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HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

brew.sh

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

#81

Who the hell uses homebrew to install Perl? OS X ships with it, and perlbrew is a much more natural way to install it if you care about not using the system Perl. Maybe it's a dep for another package?

>Maybe it's a dep for another package? This is likely the reason. I would imagine more people use things written in Perl rather than Perl itself as a programming tool.

Also, Perlbrew is not necessarily easier, simply because having one package manager manage your packages is better than having many package managers (cargo, npm, gem, etc). It suggests that maybe there should be a package manager for all these package managers... I'd personally want to use the simplest way possible to install something unless I had a reason.

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

#83
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.

Or probably since the very first brew command on the homepage is `brew install wget`.

"Ah, wget. I guess I do need that."

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

#85

Just curious, How does the brew analytics infra look like?Datastores, Aggregations, rollups etc.

They use Google Analytics. Here's there post about it https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....

There are also instructions on how to opt-out.

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

#86
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It informs me of software I didn't know about and yet is popular among presumably mostly developers and power users. I need to know about that.

There are literally dozens of "how I setup my machine/tools I use" lists and even setup scripts on GitHub.if you "need" to know what others are doing, refer to those. Or ask. I'll happily tell you my toolset, but I don't use home brew and I wouldn't allow it to send my usage to google even if I did

Thanks for being so open to sharing. Do you have a blog? How do I find your blog? Before you posted this comment how would I even know to look you up.

Just because someone on the internet had a particular setup doesn't mean I want to follow it. Or that I have time to track down several people's opinions.

Getting install stats directly from the homebrew project, which I know because I use it, is infinitely more useful to me and much more easily discoverable. that's just my opinion though and you're entitled to your own.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally dozens of "how I setup my machine/tools I use" lists and even setup scripts on GitHub.if you "need" to know what others are doing, refer to those. Or ask. I'll happily tell you my toolset, but I don't use home brew and I wouldn't allow it to send my usage to google even if I did

Thanks for being so open to sharing. Do you have a blog? How do I find your blog? Before you posted this comment how would I even know to look you up. Just because someone on the internet had a particular setup doesn't mean I want to follow it. Or that I have time to track down several people's opinions. Getting install stats directly from the homebrew project, which I know because I use it, is infinitely more useful…

They have a section on this very website, called "Ask HN". It's not uncommon for people to ask for opinions/input on tooling.

That also gives you more context, because it's answering your actual question, rather than trying to answer your own question with a bunch of vaguely related data.

It also handles the dependency issue. Someone asked why imagemagick is so popular, but its probably actually just a dependency for language-level bindings (e.g. php-imagick), not that people are using `convert` or `identify` directly on the CLI.

Heck, consider the case of front-end developers who have a toolset that depends on nodejs. They may never write any server side code, but if they follow recent trends they probably need nodejs for their css/js "toolchain" - the stats don't tell you that though. They just tell you that nodejs is installed a lot.

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

#88

Who the hell uses homebrew to install Perl? OS X ships with it, and perlbrew is a much more natural way to install it if you care about not using the system Perl. Maybe it's a dep for another package?

If I wanted a newer version of Perl (or Python, or anything else that ships with macOS), I'd use homebrew, if only to keep everything in the same place. By doing so, for example, brew upgrade would update everything. That's the whole point of package managers, having a discrete package manager for each package defeats the purpose. This is also a reason why I dislike npm and the weird practice of distributing non-js packages with it.

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

#89
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably in part because the_silver_searcher ('ag') which is a very similar tool is #65 It's the one I personally use simply because I discovered it before ripgrep came out. Plus the 'ag' commandline is super easy.

ripgrep's command line is `rg`, and it's much faster. When I first installed it I aliased `ag` to it to easy the transition.

How often do you handle files large enough to observe a difference between grep, ack, ag and rg ?

I'm willing to bet (and happy to lose) that most people, even in the subset who use grep "a lot" (defining "a lot"...), wouldn't see a significant improvement. They are people (I'm betting fewer) who need speed above all other concerns, and those people already make it to the top 1000.

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