Live data from Hacker News

HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

brew.sh

21–30 of 168 posts

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#21

Can someone explain the popularity of imagemagick on there? As in, are that many people tinkering with graphics via the command-line?

Imagemagick and graphicsmagick are being used for server side image manipulation. E.g when you upload your images on a server, two of the first things to be done is to delete the metadata and resize.

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#22
post #6

Homebrew's use of analytics still bothers me; specifically, making data public like this. It was supposed to only be used for development efforts, not showing off top-1000 lists. Also, I guess this following statement is - taking the charitable option - out of date. > Homebrew's analytics are accessible to Homebrew's current maintainers. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... Yeah, I know, my…

I'm curious why releasing data in this fashion is troubling? It think this kind of public data sharing in an open-source project is good, since it builds transparency. A top-N list seems like a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem, similar to other package managers. Without any other identifiable information like email addresses, it seems near impossible to de-anonymize statistical usage from this set.

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that ripgrep won't let you specify an arbitrary list of filename extensions to search. You have to do some voodoo to get it to only search .foo files. With ag it's as simple as -G foo. It's better than ag in a lot of ways, but there are little pain points like that which make me shift back and forth between tools.

You can't accomplish that with the -g glob flag?

  $ rg -g l foo
  No files were searched, which means ripgrep probably
  applied a filter you didn't expect. Try running again
  with --debug.
Empirically not! :)

EDIT: I see, you have to do "rg -g '*.l' foo". Well, that's a bit silly. Why force people to put asterisks inside of single quotes on the command line? Asterisks have a specific meaning in a shell setting. It's five times longer than -G l, the ag equivalent.

EDIT: Thanks for all the explanations.

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't accomplish that with the -g glob flag?

$ rg -g l foo No files were searched, which means ripgrep probably applied a filter you didn't expect. Try running again with --debug. Empirically not! :) EDIT: I see, you have to do "rg -g '*.l' foo". Well, that's a bit silly. Why force people to put asterisks inside of single quotes on the command line? Asterisks have a specific meaning in a shell setting. It's five times longer than -G l, the ag equivalent. EDIT:…

This is because of the shell, not the executable. The shell will translate `*` into a relevant list of files before passing them to the executable.

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#28
post #20

Can someone explain the popularity of imagemagick on there? As in, are that many people tinkering with graphics via the command-line?

A lot of stuff at the top of the list is requirements/pre-requisites for other packages, for example wget is in top place used by other packages to download stuff.

i'm not sure this is true. erlang ranks lower than elixir, but erlang is a prereq for elixir

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#29
post #6

Homebrew's use of analytics still bothers me; specifically, making data public like this. It was supposed to only be used for development efforts, not showing off top-1000 lists. Also, I guess this following statement is - taking the charitable option - out of date. > Homebrew's analytics are accessible to Homebrew's current maintainers. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... Yeah, I know, my…

I'm curious why releasing data in this fashion is troubling? It think this kind of public data sharing in an open-source project is good, since it builds transparency. A top-N list seems like a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem, similar to other package managers. Without any other identifiable information like email addresses, it seems near impossible to de-anonymize statistical usage from this…

> similar to other package managers

Interesting; I don't see apt, dpkg, nix, or yum maintainers releasing top lists of packages. Even the package providers rarely provide a "top" list, especially one with compile-time flags.

Those flags being provided in this list are very explicit, which could be easily correlated with data provided (or harvested) by other parties.

> a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem

What value does this really provide to the general public, other than a, ahem, "member" measuring contest? You already see this occurring in this very thread - the MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comments. I fully expect a "Node vs. X" one as well.

Re: HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

#30
post #6

Homebrew's use of analytics still bothers me; specifically, making data public like this. It was supposed to only be used for development efforts, not showing off top-1000 lists. Also, I guess this following statement is - taking the charitable option - out of date. > Homebrew's analytics are accessible to Homebrew's current maintainers. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... Yeah, I know, my…

There's significant value, when developing a product, in knowing which other products your customers are likely to have, so that you can prioritise your different integrations. Similar data could probably be compiled from Google Trends, but this clean and authoritative view is something that can be trusted, and I think the result makes the open-source ecosystem stronger.

That only sets up the value proposition for the maintainers - not for making it public. What value do any of us, not on the Homebrew maintenance team, derive from this list (other than fuel for "X is better than Y" arguments)?
Post reply on HN