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HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year

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

#141

Post by falcolas »

woodruffw wrote: post #46
falcolas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as justification for removing an unused formula This does not, in my mind, help the case at all. This culture of deletion makes no real sense to me; something not being used for a month or a year doesn't mean it's not being used at all. What's the real cost of just leaving those formula around? A slight problem with it not working immediately when it is used? At least then it can be fixed, instead of seeing the "No…

> What's the real cost of just leaving those formula around? Maintenance. When unused and unmaintained projects and formulae pile up in Homebrew, we end up spending a tremendous amount of time and effort patching mostly unused software for a very small part of the userbase. That dis-proportionality hurts the 95% of users who expect timely and well-tested updates to major packages. We used to provide a "boneyard" tap…

Somewhat of a tangent, but a lot of these reasons seem to boil down to "we don't have the resources". The HomeBrew project does appear to have a Patreon account, but to find it you have to go to the GitHub repo and scroll to the bottom of the readme. It might help to promote that a bit more on the homepage. It might also help to engage a bit more with the community other than "here's a new release".

IOW, HomeBrew seems to be big enough that it needs to start engaging in some PR.

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

#142

Post by contras1970 »

woodruffw wrote: post #49
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been delighted to install casks using `brew cask install X` where X is some obscure program that I thought brew cask would never have bothered adding. Stuff like that dazzled me about brew cask, so I hope it never goes away even under the guise of maintenance burden. (It's pretty easy to contribute your own formulas, too! The checklist is pretty small.) That said, I've occasionally run into a broken `brew cask i…

As a nit, `brew install` and `brew cask install` use largely different codebases ;) In the best case, the community does pick up the work of patching and maintaining formulae (and casks). However, that's the best case, and low-volume formulae rarely fall into it. In my experience, formulae tend to get abandoned by the upstream that originally submitted them, causing them to eventually break when the system or surroun…

> the community does pick up the work of patching and maintaining formulae (and casks). However, that's the best case, and low-volume formulae rarely fall into it.

IMO that's self-inflicted by homebrew's policies. from https://docs.brew.sh/Acceptable-Formulae.html :

> We frown on authors submitting their own work unless it is very popular.

I'd expect "very popular" software to have relatively large populations of users capable of maintaining the formulae (and authors less likely to bother with packaging), while in lesser-known software, the respective authors are most likely to maintain long-time interest.

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

#143

Post by falcolas »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #100
falcolas wrote: 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…

> volunteer-run open source projects to properly respect the privacy of their users If you don't trust us to respect your privacy why are you trusting us to download and run code from the internet on your machine? We need analytics to effectively run the Homebrew project (as you've noted: we are volunteers). If you no longer trust our project: go use something else.

In short, I can verify what's being done on my computer. I can inspect the formulas and verify that what is claimed to be executed is what is actually being executed.

I can't on yours (or Google's).

EDIT: I'm sorry, was there something factually wrong with this statement to warrant downvoting it into oblivion?

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

#144

Post by mholt »

djhworld wrote: post #95
mholt wrote: post #24

Great. Caddy is #666. Hope that's not a sign. :P

I moved from NGINX to Caddy on my raspberry pi 3 for my home needs and couldn't be happier. The automatic LetsEncrypt stuff is great and has removed crufty cron jobs to make sure the certs are up to date, and support for HTTP/2 out the box (with 0 configuration) has seen a marked improvement in the performance of my site.

That's excellent to hear! Glad you are happy. Thank you to people like you in the community who test it in various environments to make sure it works well. ;)

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

#145

Post by gnufied »

burntsushi wrote: post #118
jrimbault wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The popularity of ripgrep, ag, ack, etc., is an object lesson in "defaults matter." I don't say this in the prescriptive sense, i.e., "hey, you, you should care about defaults!", but rather, in the descriptive sense, i.e., "there are a lot of people out there that care about the defaults." The second lesson to learn is that people care about the difference between "results are instant" and "there is a bit of noticeab…

Have you considered problem of printing searched results to terminal? I saw it is detailed little bit in your blog, but one of the things that bothers me is - say I am searchin for string "foo" in a 2GB log file. There are usual number of matches, nothing unusual.

But typically, I am not really looking for string "foo". I guess most users who are grepping log files are also looking for strings/text that appear slightly before and slightly after the match. This mostly happens when I am searching for an error/exception that triggered "foo". I find usability of grep frustrating when I need to search around something. It usually means, I have to restart the search with `grep -C` or something like that and even then line numbers I specified may not be enough.

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

#146

Post by fredsir »

Scarbutt wrote: post #71
trengrj wrote: post #56

It is weird how small our global tech tribe is. I would estimate I download tmux via homebrew once a year on average. It is possible 112,000 represents a good estimate of all mac carrying tmux users in the world [*]. For comparison this is roughly the same number as employees at Apple. Assuming these stats aren't opt in.

For another view, I'm a mac user, but prefer to use all those tools via a linux VM, either local, remote server or from a VPS. Also, not everyone doing development in macos uses homebrew.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you prefer working in a linux VM or VPS?

And what are the pros and cons?

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

#147

Post by steveklabnik »

burntsushi wrote: post #133
steveklabnik wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rustc and Cargo are packaged for Debian; both are Rust applications. That shouldn't be the holdup.

Oh, I thought Cargo hadn't made it into Debian. I'm way behind the times then. :-)

It's not in stable, but it is in sid and buster. Now that rustc builds with Cargo, you gotta get both. :)

https://crates.io/crates/debcargo is also a big help.

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

#148

Post by sigzero »

zakk wrote: post #140
zeroxfe wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data. So what if they make profit -- they provide a fantastic service that actually works well, and it allows homebrew (and many other systems) to continue to provide it's services for free.

If you are fine with a company profiting out of your personal information and habits, I am not, and I think is a reasonable choice to assume that people are not fine with that.

Then those people won't use Homebrew.

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

#149

Post by octalmage »

zakk wrote: post #106
mikemcquaid wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is telemetry collected through Google? No-one else provides anywhere near the same scale for free. We have over a million monthly active users and every other solution we tried (including FOSS ones) either fell over at that load or we couldn't find anyone willing to provide hosting for us. We don't send any personally identifiable information to Google. You are tracked by a randomly generated UUID (which you ca…

First of all, let me say I appreciate your response and your work on Homebrew, a great piece of software, and quite a blessing for Mac users. > No-one else provides anywhere near the same scale for free. That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data. > We don't send any personally identifiable information to Google. You are tracked by a randomly generated UU…

I also use Google Analytics for tracking usage in my desktop applications (opt out) and it's great. I think most just think about web stats (page views) but I just use the event system. This allows me to identify unused features or possible confusing UX. I also started using it in a project at work and the data has been extremely useful.

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

#150

Post by zakk »

sigzero wrote: post #148
zakk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are fine with a company profiting out of your personal information and habits, I am not, and I think is a reasonable choice to assume that people are not fine with that.

Then those people won't use Homebrew.

Sure! But the telemetry is a default setting, and the implications for the user’s privacy are not clear at all.

Opt-in telemetry clearly stating that Google will record the first three bytes of your IP? I’m OK with that!

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