At some point, Liquibase added an analytics/telemetry "phone home" to gather user data.
I get how companies and FOSS projects greatly benefit from knowing more about their users, but I think this should only be done with proper consent. I would not assume/expect any libraries to send analytics home. The default behavior of trackers like these should always be to *not* phone home without a user first consenting / opting in.
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I'm not sure this is the right change, but it works (feedback welcome). My naïve test/check to know this works is visually inspecting the output of the log message I added in TenantDatabaseUpgradeService to see if `liquibase.analytics.enabled` is set, and to what. I'm happy to automate this, but it seemed unnecessary (again, feedback welcome).
We could also disable the phone home with an environment variable ( LIQUIBASE_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=false , see https://docs.liquibase.com/analytics/home.html ). I'm not sure where that should be set if we did. Likely several places (for build/dev/test/ci/qa/etc.).
I originally noticed the phone home because I block requests from my computer to 3rd party tracking/analytics services, and I was getting this error in my console:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused at liquibase.analytics.LiquibaseAnalyticsListener
At first I misunderstood this as a database connection error, but it was really just liquibase throwing an error because it couldn't connect to its own analytics server.
If we were to create a configurable property, I think the ideal place to set the value would be in fineract-provider/src/main/resources/application.properties, (default to false, allow override) but our version of spring boot doesn't support it yet ( see https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/43067 ) so we'd have to add the usual scaffolding required for a Fineract setting. I'm not sure we want/need that, because I can't imagine anyone *wanting* to set the flag to `true`, and my naïve hardcoded global change is less code to maintain than providing a configurable setting. If there's demand to make it configurable later, we could of course do that (especially once it becomes easier to do so). I feel like how we let Liquibase behave is up to us, though. An under the hood / upstream decision we get to make.
See also:
* https://lists.apache.org/thread/5s7zjsxdcqk1qvjnc1wbhqqv66shpl54
* Analytics is enabled by default in OSS version · Issue #6503 · liquibase/liquibase · GitHub https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/issues/6503
* Add a method for Spring Boot to configure the new analytics feature · Issue #6501 · liquibase/liquibase · GitHub https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/issues/6501
