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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

You could really screw with their statistics by regularly changing the contents of that file.

Homebrew maintainer here. Remember that we didn’t put these analytics in place to get rich or get free beer at the local pub. Screwing up the stats won’t help anyone.

We currently don’t have any overview of our userbase; we don’t even know how many people use Homebrew. More importantly, Homebrew currently only bottles the default options but we know some people use some options that cause the formulae to build from source. If tomorrow we see that e.g. `brew install foo --with-bar` is run by hundreds of people everyday we could start bottling it and saving time to everyone. But right now that’s completely dark; the only insights we have about the usage is people opening issues/PRs.

Amazing. I've been using --with-python3 a lot, having a bottled option would be great.

I'll leave analytics turned on, but the blog post says it'll strip arguments. Your example above seems to conflict with what the post says, no?

Yeah it’s not implemented yet. We’re doing it incrementally and actually started shipping the first bits one month ago (but it was opt-in for tests). Bottling the most used options is something we’re really excited both as maintainers and users and is IMO the number 1 reason these analytics will benefit everyone. We’re currently looking how it behaves and will add them soon.

The biggest benefit of this change is getting people to reconsider their usage of homebrew. For example, now I'm looking into Nix. These sorts of changes fuel competition and innovation.

I'm reminded of when Adblock Plus went sour, and we got uBlock Origin. There are lots of examples of this.

Out of curiosity, would the homebrew maintainers be open to replacing google analytics with an open source setup if the infrastructure was sponsored?

I can’t speak for all the team here but yes that’s something we’d consider. Someone suggested Keen IO on the issues tracker which is not open-source but it’s the only viable alternative that has been proposed so far, and it’s not from Google so some people would be more happy with that.

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