ENH: Add operating system to user-agent

[at88mph]

Add system to user-agent.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #344 (5de6759) into main (197cd38) will increase coverage by 0.00%.
The diff coverage is 100.00%.

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  Files          46       46           
  Lines        5493     5494    +1     
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+ Hits         4300     4301    +1     
  Misses       1193     1193           

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
pyvo/utils/http.py	100.00% <100.00%> (ø)

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[msdemlei]

I can't say I'm terribly happy to see pyVO leaking more information on the client than absolutely necessary, and I'm not convinced information on the platform people use count as "absolutely necessary". Then again, very few people care to tame their browsers' chattiness in that respect, so it's not like we're betraying secrets folks generally care about.

Still: What exactly is this supposed to help with/fix?

[at88mph]

The use case is from the astroquery.alma client that wishes to have statistics, service optimization, and to track errors that are inconsistent across systems. I moved it up to pyvo as it's not unusual to contain the OS in the user-agent header and is perhaps better suited there.

[andamian]

The question here is really if the OS information is something useful to have in general for service providers to improve their services. The astroquery.alma case, and other similar cases where user-agent or other headers need to be present or have certain values, can be easily solved by creating a custom session with the appropriate values that is then passed to service classes.

[andamian]

What do you think @tomdonaldson?

[bsipocz]

Having some stats on the platform is also rather useful info to know how much effort to put into fixing exotic bugs. E.g. we regularly receive reports from packagers about issues with some edge cases, knowing whether there is any realistic chance that those affect actual users would be useful. (And as it was said above, none of these are super secrets anyways but rather standards stats most webpages and apis already collecting).
Another side effect would be to know which platforms to tune the docs and tutorial/workshop material as users don't necessarily communicate issues upstream.

[msdemlei]

Just in case you're waiting for my blessing: Totally feel free to merge from my side [I can't resist pointing out I mainly don't care because almost nobody cleans their browser strings, so they clearly don't feel this info is a breach of their privacy. I'm still unconvinced platform stats -- as opposed the client software itself -- help in practice.] Ah, wait, one thing. *If* we touch this, can we briefly see whether we ought to do something wrt https://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/softid/index.html?

[at88mph]

Hi @msdemlei. The new format would just append (%OS_NAME). If that doesn't conform to anything in that document we can rework the layout. The examples (https://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/softid/20210115/NOTE-softid-1.0-20210115.html#tth_sEc2.3) suggest that wrapping it in parentheses may not be necessary though. Do you have a strong opinion on that?

[msdemlei]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 04:19:48PM -0700, Dustin wrote: The new format would just append `(%OS_NAME)`. If that doesn't conform to anything in that document we can rework the layout. The examples (https://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/softid/20210115/NOTE-softid-1.0-20210115.html#tth_sEc2.3) suggest that wrapping it in parentheses may not be necessary though. Do you have a strong opinion on that?

No, I have no strong opinion (just weak skepticism:-). The question is what you want to communicate. As per the grammar we're reproducing in sect. 2.1, the user agent header contains a set of product ids, possibly qualified with comments. So, if you say pyVO/1.5 (MaginificentLinux/10.29.1pl23) you're really saying "This is pyVO 1.5, and by the way, I'm somehow related to some specific Linux Distro). If you said pyVO/1.5 MagificentLinux/10.29.1pl23 instead, you'd be saying "this is pyVO 1.5 running on top of thisandthat Distribution". Which is preferable hence really depends on why you're communicating the platform in the first place. Is it because pyVO will behave differently on different platforms? Then the comment thing might be preferable. Is it because you're interested in platforms independently of pyVO? Then mark it up as a separate component. But while I'm looking at things: Be sure to check RFC 2616 (or even better the appropriate successor) to see what you should do when there's whitespace in OS_NAME -- I *think* you need quotes, but given I'm on holidays I can't be bothered to look it up...

[at88mph]

According to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6:

A string of text is parsed as a single value if it is quoted using
double-quote marks.

I'm pretty sure it's referring to the entire value though, not just the OS name appendage.

Mozilla has examples (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/User-Agent):

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36 Edg/91.0.864.59

There are no quotes around the OS names here, and there are parentheses.

RFC 7231 and 7230 succeed 2616, and also states:

User-Agent = product *( RWS ( product / comment ) )

Where the product is a name "/" version, but makes no mention of double-quoting it, just that there is required white space. See also https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.

I'm happy to remove the parentheses, but it would also be beneficial to remain consistent with what may be expected. Thoughts?

[msdemlei]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2022 at 06:38:14AM -0700, Dustin wrote: I'm happy to remove the parentheses, but it would also be beneficial to remain consistent with what may be expected. Thoughts?

Not from me. I'd say just merge it like it is; I doubt the ALMA people will care either way.