Bug#1001647: visidata phones home

[cacin at allfreemail.net]

Package: visidata
Version: 3.0.2-1
Followup-For: Bug #1001647

I am submitting a patch for the version of visidata currently packaged in
debian sid to eliminate the default behavior of the application phoning home,
which has raised some privacy concerns.

When this patch is applied, visidata will not phone home by default anymore.
Users retain the possibility to enable the phoning home functionality by
explicitly specifying the options.motd_url option in their visidatarc
configuration file with a suitable value.

There is an existing lintian tag, privacy-breach-generic, which can be used as
an indication that phoning home is considered undesirable behavior within the
debian project. Additionally, other packages in debian, for example gpsbabel
[1], have also been modified to remove similar privacy issues, further
establishing a precedent for this change.

While this behavior is not explicitly codified in debian policy yet, phoning
home goes against user expectations when utilizing debian-provided packages.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-gps-team/pkg-gpsbabel/-/tree/master/debian/patches?ref_type=heads
-------------- next part --------------
diff --git a/visidata/motd.py b/visidata/motd.py
index 571a8de..e1aaa75 100644
--- a/visidata/motd.py
+++ b/visidata/motd.py
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ import random
 
 from visidata import options, asyncsingle, vd, VisiData
 
-vd.option('motd_url', 'https://visidata.org/motd-'+vd.version, 'source of randomized startup messages', sheettype=None)
+vd.option('motd_url', '', 'source of randomized startup messages', sheettype=None)
 
 
 vd.motd = 'Support VisiData: https://github.com/sponsors/saulpw'