> Why have telemetry at all? Essentially, it’s to help us to identify product issues early:
> Audacity is widely used across several platforms, but we have no information on the application stability.
Really? You have no information about this? Don't you think instability would be reported by some users?
> It is difficult for us to estimate the size of the user base accurately.
You can obtain an estimate by tracking the number of downloads along with some far less intrusive metrics like user agent, etc.
> We need a way to make informed decisions about which OS versions to support. For example, can we raise the minimum version of the macOS to 10.10 to update the wxWidgets to the latest version?
Generally speaking no you should not raise the minimum OS version on a ubiquitous piece of software like this. Either work with the library vendor to find a way to support old and new, or use a different library.
At a minimum keep the old versions around, there are no doubt offline installations out there running on old kit. Don't force everyone to upgrade their hardware/OS (it's expensive, and with apple products also means usable hardware going to the landfill)
> We have a known issue with the new file format introduced in Audacity 3.0. We found it with the great help of the community members on our forum. However, there is no way for us to estimate the impact of these issues on users. Is it just a random case? Do we need to rush the work on the recovery tool or help the users one by one? Or do we need to rethink the file format to make it safer and more easily recoverable?
Again, use the estimate metrics from downloads and user agents. And in any event you should prioritize fixes by the severity of the actual bug, not by "how many people does it affect". Just focus on writing stable software.
> Audacity is widely used across several platforms, but we have no information on the application stability.
Really? You have no information about this? Don't you think instability would be reported by some users?
> It is difficult for us to estimate the size of the user base accurately.
You can obtain an estimate by tracking the number of downloads along with some far less intrusive metrics like user agent, etc.
> We need a way to make informed decisions about which OS versions to support. For example, can we raise the minimum version of the macOS to 10.10 to update the wxWidgets to the latest version?
Generally speaking no you should not raise the minimum OS version on a ubiquitous piece of software like this. Either work with the library vendor to find a way to support old and new, or use a different library.
At a minimum keep the old versions around, there are no doubt offline installations out there running on old kit. Don't force everyone to upgrade their hardware/OS (it's expensive, and with apple products also means usable hardware going to the landfill)
> We have a known issue with the new file format introduced in Audacity 3.0. We found it with the great help of the community members on our forum. However, there is no way for us to estimate the impact of these issues on users. Is it just a random case? Do we need to rush the work on the recovery tool or help the users one by one? Or do we need to rethink the file format to make it safer and more easily recoverable?
Again, use the estimate metrics from downloads and user agents. And in any event you should prioritize fixes by the severity of the actual bug, not by "how many people does it affect". Just focus on writing stable software.