261–270 of 403 posts
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.
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homebrew is a package manager with thousands of packages, not a file server. We maintain those packages, and knowing when they break (or can be deprecated due to lack of use) is critical to the project's sustenance.
Okay, fair enough. But the breakage can't be detected without telemetry then, I take it? If so, that's... not ideal for sure.
However, we can't catch everything: Homebrew has millions of users, and those users have all kinds of different setups. We can't predict every possible host and software interaction; basic failure analytics help bridge the gap there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be a staunch macports evangelist but ended up switching to homebrew. I've found it to be much simpler. And, as a counter to your experience of not having it mess up a machine, every time you upgrade macOS to the next major version you have to jump through some hoops to get it to play ball again. Painful. At some point I gave up on the hoops and installed homebrew instead and haven't looked back.
Well, you can nuke macports just by deleting /opt/local. It's annoying to have to recompile for sure, but at least it's a simple solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, fair enough. But the breakage can't be detected without telemetry then, I take it? If so, that's... not ideal for sure.
Homebrew can detect a lot of things during normal maintenance work: there are extensive tests and checks during compilation and bottle building, for example. However, we can't catch everything: Homebrew has millions of users, and those users have all kinds of different setups. We can't predict every possible host and software interaction; basic failure analytics help bridge the gap there.
Where can I learn more? Can you point me at the right place in the source?
I'll not be banning Homebrew telemetry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the Homebrew documentation: A Homebrew analytics user ID, e.g. 1BAB65CC-FE7F-4D8C-AB45-B7DB5A6BA9CB. This is generated by uuidgen and stored in the repository-specific Git configuration variable homebrew.analyticsuuid within $(brew --repository)/.git/config. This does not allow us to track individual users, but does enable us to accurately measure user counts versus event counts. The ID is specific to the Homebr…
Read your own cite: nothing about the UUID in question is associable with an identified or identifiable natural person, which is what the GDPR concerns. We do not have the ability to correlate your package installs (again, we do not know what you install) with your browsing history, and we do not store any information that would allow us (or an adversary) to do so.
This is false and a misunderstanding of the GDPR. It is not about whether it is currently possible. But whether it would be possible if it was correlated with other data.
What differs pseudonymisation from anonymisation is that the latter consists of removing personal identifiers, aggregating data, or processing this data in a way that it can no longer be related to an identified or identifiable individual. Unlike anonymised data, pseudonymised data qualifies as personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Therefore, the distinction between these two concepts should be preserved.
https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/blog/ps...
‘pseudonymisation’ means the processing of personal data in such a manner that the personal data can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information, provided that such additional information is kept separately and is subject to technical and organisational measures to ensure that the personal data are not attributed to an identified or identifiable natural person;
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
So, basically if we have a data set with three columns:
Personal name, UUID, Action (e.g. brew install fzf)
Removing the first column is pseudonymization, and thus qualifies as personal data under the GDPR. Removing the first and the second column is anonymisation and is not personal data.
Again IANAL, but it is clear from the GDPR that the only thing you could do without consent is e.g. recording what packages get installed/uninstalled, but without a UUID.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just checked their OpenCollective, and they seem to have about US$100k there: https://opencollective.com/homebrew#category-BUDGET They seem to be receiving about US$2k/month via Patreon too: https://www.patreon.com/homebrew I think their Patreon was around the same when I looked ~12 months ago.
$2k/mo is a terribly low figure for a piece of software that nearly every dev on macOS uses.
It's also pretty likely they get a lot of their resources for free / sponsored too.
So, US$2k/mo might be fine (no idea).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read your own cite: nothing about the UUID in question is associable with an identified or identifiable natural person, which is what the GDPR concerns. We do not have the ability to correlate your package installs (again, we do not know what you install) with your browsing history, and we do not store any information that would allow us (or an adversary) to do so.
Read your own cite: nothing about the UUID in question is associable with an identified or identifiable natural person, which is what the GDPR concerns. This is false and a misunderstanding of the GDPR. It is not about whether it is currently possible. But whether it would be possible if it was correlated with other data. What differs pseudonymisation from anonymisation is that the latter consists of removing persona…
> 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.b…
If my computer is sending data to Google then Google has my IP address and can correlate that data however they want. You simply can not claim that identifiable information isn't collected or retained unless you work for Google.
I don't know if you work with Homebrew or not, but I would be much more comfortable if they used something like Plausible for analytics.
[flagged]
Does "nazi" even mean anything anymore, or do we just use it to describe things we don't like? Does nobody care about Godwin's law?
Godwin's Law certainly applies in this case.
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…
I used macOS for a few years to try it out, and I found that Macports lacked many things I needed. Taking a quick look again, let's see...
* Oclgrind: No.
* Futhark: No.
* GHC: Yes! And updated to boot. (But I'd expect such major programs to be in any package system.)
* MLkit: No.
* hledger: Yes, although not the newest version.
* git-annex: Yes, but a rather old version.
* ispc: Yes, but again a rather old version.
The impression I got (which may be inaccurate) is that Macports has a long tail of older packages, but it does not have a lot of newer stuff. It is very easy and convenient to add packages to Homebrew (just a PR with a package definition in a Ruby DSL; most things are obvious), which I think is the main reason it has become successful.
Nowadays I suggest everyone just use Nix, of course. It's not as slick and has a tough barrier to entry, but it's built on fundamentally better principles than legacy package managers.