Clarify that `DO_NOT_TRACK` only disables telemetry if `1` or `true`

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#45,957 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
90/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
github, shell
Domain
cli, documentation

Research direction

Open the linked docs.github.com GitHub CLI telemetry article and locate the “How to opt out” environment-variables section. Compare the wording with the linked cli/cli internal/telemetry/telemetry.go reference around line 128, then clarify which DO_NOT_TRACK values disable telemetry and verify that the example remains accurate.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

content triage
Code of Conduct
What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/github-cli/github-cli/github-cli-telemetry#how-to-opt-out

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

The section on environment variables currently looks like this:

Environment variables:

export GH_TELEMETRY=false

Any falsy value works: 0, false, disabled, or an empty string. You can also use the DO_NOT_TRACK convention:

export DO_NOT_TRACK=true

Saying that any falsy value works for GH_TELEMETRY right before introducing DO_NOT_TRACK can create the implication that any truthy value would be accepted for DO_NOT_TRACK. I believe this is not the case though; it looks like DO_NOT_TRACK must be 1 or true. It would be nice to clarify this.

It also seems like most people set DO_NOT_TRACK to 1 anyway, so it would be good to be explicit for the opposite reason too; we don't want people to assume that only true is accepted.

Additional information

No response

Dominant language
TypeScript
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