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Comment by lawtalkinghuman | Hacker News Reader

That'd likely break a lot of CI workloads.

As I said:

> if an environment variable (eg. GO_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1) is not detected

It could also easily rely on whether the shell is attached to a tty to detect a CI environment, and disable telemetry by default in this case.

It wouldn't. Most (read: all) CI tools would allow you to set an Env variable. So you could just set the Env to bypass the input.

Easy enough to check for the presence of a TTY and only prompt then. CI wouldn't have a TTY and thus wouldn't prompt.

"Falsehoods programmers believe about CI"

I mean, I completely agree with you in principle, but also there are a lot of terrible CI systems out there.

Ok, then let’s admit it breaks your CI. So what? You fix it by setting an environment variable and you’re good to go after 2 minutes.

In any good development org, yes. But I'm sure there are orgs out there where the team that manages the environment and the team that does Go builds are two separate teams.

Now the team managing CI (or QA which could actually be in a TTY) needs to notice these failures and communicate them (via a JIRA ticket of course) back to the development team. That team doesn't know what it's about and sticks it on the backlog. Eventually they give the right environment variable, but environment variables are a security risk so it needs to go through security review, and because this mentions telemetry data the privacy and legal teams want sign-off...

This might be an exaggeration, but I think it's worth thinking about the worst case scenario when building things like this into development tools that are used so widely.

Hey, if it can help highlight dysfunctional Kafkaesque processes in companies, that's a bonus.

If you can't update an environment variable yourself, or ask directly someone who can, all that on a CI system that's somehow bound to TTY, get out of here.

Said like someone who has never had to fix a broad corporate CI system.

Fixing this in several CI systems I've encountered would take well into months, plausibly with many unknown failures because of cached builds.

Yeah, don’t hide behind « but in real world… », what you describe is utterly dysfunctional and completely insane.

That's better than violating people's right to privacy without their consent.

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