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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

#161

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

I am, personally. It's just the quickest way for me to manipulate images. I don't have Photoshop installed, and macOS' Preview only gets you so far.

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

#162

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?

`brew install ` is a natural thing to try first. If it works well then why use something else?

Works well for what? There's a recent Perl already installed on machines that brew runs on

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`brew install ` is a natural thing to try first. If it works well then why use something else?

Works well for what? There's a recent Perl already installed on machines that brew runs on

The system perl on my work mac is v5.18.2. It's years out of date. If I want to run something that needs a newer version I can either update it without knowing what impact that has on the rest of the things running on my computer (seems like a bad plan...) or I can install a newer version alongside the system perl. My preferred method for that would be brew because I use brew for pretty much everything. I don't really want a second (or third, or fourth) package manager for every other thing.

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

#165
post #106

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…

> That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data.

Yep and that's an acceptable trade-off for the maintainers of Homebrew given that we need analytics to do our (volunteer, free-time) job adequately and we do not have financial resources for other alternatives. If you're willing to provide those financial resources indefinitely: get in touch.

> Even with no IP, Google can easily cross-references searches and the random UUID, since a typical use case is that a user installs something through Homebrew after Googling it.

That may be technically possible but I see no evidence that it is the case.

> Please rethink this bad default choice. And sorry if my reply sounds harsh, but I think that Google tracking by default is an extremely bad choice for your users.

We disagree. Please consider another macOS package manager. MacPorts is a good alternative.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can trivially verify all the information that's sent by us to Google; we have an environment variable to do exactly that.

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

#167

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?

Based on how low it is on the rankings compared to other languages I'd say not many.

I have no data to back this up other than my anecdotal personal experience but I'd wager Perl hackers who use Homebrew never use it to install Perl.

Most of the classic Perl documentation walks you through installing from source, which is quite easy, and modern documentation/tutorials usually refer to perlbrew.

The Perl community often has established solutions within their own ecosystem, and this makes them seem like they have a smaller presence then the otherwise would have.

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