[Yum-devel] [UG] RFE: Add OS name to user_agent default?

[Brian Long]

On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 13:01 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 12:06 -0400, James Antill wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 11:23 -0400, Brian Long wrote:
> > > Many browsers including the OS name and platform architecture in their
> > > user agent strings.  Mozilla includes "PPC Mac OS X" or "Linux i686",
> > > for example.  I was hoping you might consider adding the name of the OS
> > > and the platform architecture to the default urlgrabber user_agent
> > > defined in grabber.py.
> > > 
> > > Currently, the user_agent is "urlgrabber/2.9.9" or "urlgrabber/3.0.0".
> > > I was wondering if you would consider changing the default to be as
> > > follows:
> > > 
> > > "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (Linux)" or "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (Linux i686)"
> > > "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (Mac OS X)" or "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (Mac OS X PPC)"
> > > "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (SunOS) or "urlgrabber/3.0.0 (SunOS sparc)".
> > > 
> > > One reason to do this would allow for OS and architecture tracking in
> > > Apache access_log.  I can currently track OS and architecture when
> > > people are using Mozilla or IE, but not when they're using yum /
> > > urlgrabber.
> > 
> >  Isn't this trivial by having $basearch and/or $releasever in your URL
> > lines?
> > 
> 
> well, up to a point - it won't tell them macosx - but, umm, let's be
> clear - that's a weird os to run on anyway :)

To be honest, I was analyzing my internal mirror's traffic using AWStats
and instead of hard-coding urlgrabber = Linux (to analyze which OS's are
visiting my mirror), I wanted to fix the root of the "problem" which is
that urlgrabber does not mention the host OS in user agent.  Most other
browsers do to some extent and many log analyzers key on the user agent
to determine the OS and platform.

This RFE is obviously low-priority and not a functional issue.
urlgrabber claims it's supported on various Unix platforms and Windows.
If so, I was hoping it would change the user agent to list on which
platform it was running.  In my case, I could theoretically modify
AWstats to say urlgrabber = Linux, but that's not a true fix.

Maybe if I supply a patch that is non-intrusive, it could be accepted
for the next release.  By the way, I've seen that CVS contains patches a
few months newer than the latest 3.0.1 release.  Are those going to be
released as 3.0.2 in the future or not until something critical is
patched?

/Brian/
-- 
       Brian Long                             |       |
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