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Homebrew 4.0.0

brew.sh

211–220 of 403 posts

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#211
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…

Time to write a client to spam both of these unauthenticated data collection endpoints with random noise data to render them useless.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#212
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…

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.

Opt-in analytics are useless, unless a large part of your userbase just clicks through the entire wizard without thinking; there’s little overlap with Homebrew’s userbase

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#213
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…

> has basically all the same packages brew does

I just checked the Semgrep port and while technically it does have it, it is around 150 releases behind the version brew has.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#214
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any actual arguments? I don't see why something that's little more than a file server needs telemetry.

[flagged]

Several phrases yet zero actual counter-arguments.

Everyone from 6 years old and above can swoop in and insult. Maybe you were lost on your way to Reddit?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#215
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…

MacPorts makes no effort to not look abandoned. It's very much 'the old way' of doing things from the look of the website to the terseness of the syntax. Before you take offense, I say this as a member of that generation.

These days if you have an ugly website, and opaque syntax, you're considered to be an abandoned project. Agree with it or not, your website sends a signal to the user and MacPort's signal says "it'll work till it doesn't and that's fine"

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#216
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they just use something like plausible for this? I switch to plausible for all my analytics and it works great. https://plausible.io/

Thanks for sharing. I was looking for other options and this looks like a good candidate. Does you or anyone else have any other suggestions?

If you are into self-hosting: https://uxwizz.com

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#217
post #47
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can specify specific package versions in brew if you want specific versions pinned. The default behaviour of using the latest in repo is correct and is how every package manager works. It’s the behaviour people expect and it’s the behaviour that is arguably more secure (the fact that homebrew is bleeding edge does create issues here but generally speaking my point stands). I believe you pin using the @ symbol fol…

This is not at all how every package manager works. On debian if you install a package it will just install that package and it will warn you if dependencies will require upgrading first. It won't upgrade totally unrelated packages and break everything for you. In addition, you have different branches where the debian stable branch is extremely well tested. Homebrew is way, way worse than any other package manager be…

Brew follows a rolling-release style, it behaves the same way the Arch Linux package manager does. In Arch users are discouraged from upgrading specific packages instead of everything as a whole.

That said, the docs say that running "brew upgrade " will only upgrade that specific package. Of course, if that package relies on new versions of dependencies, they will get updated too, and in turn this will update any packages that also depend on it, creating a chain of updates. But there's an option to see what will happen: "brew upgrade --dry-run ".

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#218
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 doesn't "report" anything to Google, much less anything of yours (implying unique identification). This is an unnecessary editorialization.

You can see exactly how Homebrew does analytics here[1], and you can see the sum total of the information collected here[2]. No identifiable information is collected or retained.

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/Library/Homebre...

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

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does a package manager need to track their users at all? Do any of you actually work in this industry shipping software products to end users? Without telemetry the problem there is literally one of trying to read the mind of your end users to figure out what they're doing, hoping that your internal CI manages to reflect the configuration in their environment.

Any actual arguments? I don't see why something that's little more than a file server needs telemetry.

> something that's little more than a file server

You're doing an awful disservice to Homebrew.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#220
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just wondering, have they considered storing all that in an SQLite file? And then you could refresh the file every 6 hours, say, and post it on a CDN?

Using SQLite instead of JSON could have worked too and would likely make the manifests smaller: > curl -sI https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.json | grep content-length => 19898457 (~19.9MB) > curl -sI https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.json | grep content-length => 4023930 (~4MB) But the JSON API has been around for a while so brew 4.0 just makes use of it by default. Brew 3.3 added an off-by-default HOMEBREW_INSTA…

> instead of checking out the large (and slow) homebrew/core and homebrew/taps repos

I actually wanted to ask why they don't just prune the history of those repos to cut down on their clone size? OT1H, I could actually imagine some software historian being curious what flags were required to build sqlite 3.6.20 from 2009 (872f50ac61d7) but OTOH building a whole new distribution system instead of effectively git-squash feels weird

As someone who regularly patches those local repos to work around silliness, I was bitten by that newfound API business and I'm thankful that env-var exists.

As someone who's seen The New Homebrew Way, I dread the day my HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API gets taken away :-(

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