[Galene] Re: Additional stats

[Stefan Bethke <stb@lassitu.de>]

On 30. Oct 2026, at 13:46, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr> wrote:
> 
>> I am running a test instance and are monitoring that through it. We will
>> use this feature in the production setup December 27th to 30th at the
>> 40th Chaos Communication Congress.
> 
> Wow!  That's excellent news.
> 
>> * We would like some fancy graphs because they are cool
> 
> That almost convinced me ;-)
> 
> Now, there are good reasons why I couldn't possibly apply your patch in
> its current state.
> 
>  - It needs careful review in order to ensure that we don't expose private
>    user data.  Respecting user privacy is an important feature of Galene,
>    and one I won't compromise on.

I completely agree, and I wouldn't want to suggest code that would leak such info.

>  - There is no evidence that the provided metrics are the ones we want.
>    Experience shows that once you include a feature, it's difficult to
>    remove (XKCD 1172), so I'd like to make sure that we only include those
>    metrics that we actually need.

Good point. Happy to pick this up again after we've had practical experience in December.

>  - It is verbose and redundant, as typical of Claude.  This makes it
>    difficult to review, and will make it difficult to maintain in the
>    long term.  This makes the first point difficult to satisfy.

I am still not sure I follow. Can you point out an example?

> I suggest the following:
> 
> 1. Extract the non-Prometheus relasted changes, and submit them in
>   a separate PR.  That will make your fork closer to upstream.

The changes to the authentication code are necessary to implement access control for the metrics endpoint, but they do not provide any functionality by themselves. I'm happy to put them in a separate commit to make it clear that they are enabling changes, but I would suggest they should only go in together with the metrics endpoint.

> 2. Run your code as a (friendly) fork until you get more experience.
>   After running your code during CCC, you'll know which metrics are
>   useful and which ones are missing.
> 
> 3. After CCC, we can discuss whether we want to work on rewriting the code
>   in a human-readable manner, or whether we want to give up.

Sure thing.


Stefan

-- 
Stefan Bethke <stb@lassitu.de>   Fon +49 175 3288861