Personally I believe that any application packaged for Debian should neither phone home, attempt to download plugins over HTTP at run-time, or update itself.
On that basis I've filed #761828.
As a project we have guidelines for what constitutes a "serious" bug, which generally boil down to a package containing a security issue, causing data-loss, or being unusuable.
I'd like to propose that these kind of tracking "things" are equally bad. If consensus could be reached that would be a good thing for the freedom of our users.
(Ooops I slipped into "us", "our user", I'm just an outsider looking in. Mostly.)
Tags: debian, misc 4 comments
The maintainer for this package was in #debian-mentors getting some advice about this a couple of weeks ago. That's good news at least.
The rest of that file is pretty ugly as code goes too... it looks a lot like someone wrote a bash script first and then "rewrote" it in C.