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Homebrew 4.0.0

brew.sh

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Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#201

Post by dagmx »

Patrol8394 wrote: post #178
stjo wrote: post #2

> Homebrew’s analytics are now sent both to Google Analytics and our new, self-hosted InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU. > If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS because you didn’t like Google Analytics and/or data being sent to the USA: please consider unsetting this and setting HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS instead, allowing analytics data to be sent to our new InfluxDB host. My package manager was reporti…

I find this very invasive and I am glad I never used homebrew and always used Macport instead.

Well I have bad news for you there too

https://ports.macports.org/statistics/faq/

I really do think that people who are concerned about telemetry should install Little Snitch and also look at each of these programs documentation. Telemetry is called out for most of them, as well as how to disable it. It’s also not inherently bad as it can be a valuable tool to improve their systems, though obviously could be abused too.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#202

Post by dagmx »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #66

Man there are a lot of complaints about this free software no one is forcing you to use. I would start with a thanks to the people who spend a lot of time on this, and probably not for much wealth. I know I greatly appreciate the existence of homebrew.

Not even just entitlement, but a lot of people thrown off by the existence of telemetry. Telemetry that it tells you about when you install it, and is mentioned on their site.

So not only are people complaining about free software, they’re complaining because they don’t pay attention. It’s the “Everything someone else does is not as good as what I do” mentality

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#203

Post by pdntspa »

woodruffw wrote: post #193
jillesvangurp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd be well advised to make this opt-in only for legal reasons. This is not going to go down well in a lot of places and they might get exposed to law suits.

Homebrew is not a custodian of any personally identifiable data.

Does that include IP addresses? Because I think that is considered PII

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#204

Post by woodruffw »

kelthan wrote: post #146
pimterry wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does a package manager need to track their users at all? According to https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics they use it to measure how often formulas fail to install, to get overall metrics on which OS versions are used, and to correlate those (i.e. to tell on which OS versions specific packages fail to install correctly). > A maintainer has no need to know who's installing what Aside from the IP, they don't know who'…

I agree that they don't need to know the "who", but it is perfectly understandable that they want to know "what" is being installed. And as part of the "what", they would want to know on which platform, and whether the install succeeded or failed, and probably a few other metrics about the install to ensure that things are working correctly and identify gaps that should be filled. Based on what I read on the site, th…

Correct: there's no identifiable information being stored, either before or with these changes.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#205

Post by vvillena »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #33

I despise, despise, Homebrew's "we know better than you" approach to always installing the latest versions of every dependency. How tf is this fine? They don't even offer alternative. They just say "we can't test all of the packages installed and all version combinations, so this is the best we can do". Well, no one asked you to test my exact setup. All I'm asking for is: if I have perfectly working Node 18 and I nee…

You didn't install "Node 18", you installed "Node". If you want Node 18, grab the "node@18" package instead of "node".

This is how Brew has managed this problem for years: problematic dependencies that need to be pinned to specific versions are given specific packages.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#207

Post by woodruffw »

pdntspa wrote: post #203
woodruffw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is not a custodian of any personally identifiable data.

Does that include IP addresses? Because I think that is considered PII

Homebrew does not store IP addresses, so yes.

You can see the totality of the information stored on the Homebrew website[1].

[1]: https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#208

Post by eddieroger »

pdntspa wrote: post #203
woodruffw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is not a custodian of any personally identifiable data.

Does that include IP addresses? Because I think that is considered PII

From the post:

> Our self-hosted InfluxDB instance does not store either anonymised IP addresses or an anonymised user token so it has additional privacy benefits over Google Analytics.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#209

Post by sneak »

yrro wrote: post #118
stjo wrote: post #2

> Homebrew’s analytics are now sent both to Google Analytics and our new, self-hosted InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU. > If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS because you didn’t like Google Analytics and/or data being sent to the USA: please consider unsetting this and setting HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS instead, allowing analytics data to be sent to our new InfluxDB host. My package manager was reporti…

Homebrew should support the DO_NOT_TRACK environment variable. https://consoledonottrack.com/ It doesn't look likely though. I don't think it looks good that comments pointing out that Homebrew's existing behaviour (collecting analytics without obtaining informed consent from users) violates the law have been classified as abuse and hidden! https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/6745

In retrospect (consoledonottrack operator here) I never should have pushed an opt out standard; it legitimizes opt-out which is indefensible and unethical.

Opt-in by advance consent is the only way. Homebrew devs are unethical jerks.

Use nixpkgs and don't look back.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#210

Post by kitsunesoba »

t8sr wrote: post #67

As an old hand who was around when homebrew started, I feel obliged to let people know there are alternatives. If you find brew's take-over-your-system-and-youll-thank-me approach off putting, and/or you value stability over the coolness factor, MacPorts is still alive and well ( https://www.macports.org ), and in-fact has basically all the same packages brew does. In 18 years of using MacPorts, it's never messed up…

The thing that pushed me over the Homebrew back when it was new was how with MacPorts, surprisingly often packages (at least those I was installing) were broken and required manual patching to make work.

While this would be a nuisance for me even today, I was only just starting to dip my toe into programming at that point which meant I lacked the technical knowledge to perform any changes more complicated than pasting in a single line somewhere, which meant it was often game over when a package was broken.

While Homebrew has its problems it’s easy to see how it became popular.

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