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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Brew is awesome. Note though that it gathers anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics and reports to Google Analytics, see https://git.io/brew-analytics .

You can opt out with

    brew analytics off

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That's a thing they shouldn't enable by default, but I don't mind it. As a developer, anonymous usage data has helped me out enough times.

People! Be nice to your fellow developers! When something asks you to send anonymized usage data, do it!

I disagree. As a friend of mine said, "if you don't trust a software package, don't use it."

I have paid exactly $0 for Homebrew. Reporting usage statistics makes it better, and I'm happy to be chip in to help out.

That's obviously fine for you to do but it's worth noting that we remove software that no-one uses where "no-one" is defined by "no-one using analytics". That's actually our main use-case for analytics.

> we remove software

Why? Personally, the only reason I would remove software from a repository is if it didn't work, impacted performance, or cost me an unreasonable amount of money/time. There's a really long tail for software packages.

In short: we generally only remove things when they break, break other things or the projects are dead. How hard we try to fix these things generally come down to how used our analytics say they are.

How did the "royal we" arrive at this "reasoning?"

If popularity were a valid signal of importance, people should only express their eternal love for PHP and Javascript, and ignore computer science, functional programming languages, computer engineering and little-known-but-really-fucking-important packages.

Call me ageist, but code churn and labeling projects "dead" adds nothing in the context of portable code which has matured to the point stability; there's zero functional value added in refactored code being "new." Ongoing support, adding features and keeping pace with platform compatibility are separate issues from judging code to be "inferior" despite working because it's "old." What may seem "dead" to people whom don't know about particular packages but may well just be stable and resting very quietly because it just works.

If projects are portable and continue to work without patching indefinitely: we don't consider them dead. What we're unwilling to do is to apply patch after patch to unmaintained and undeveloped projects to keep them working on macOS; at that point we're forking the project and lack either the desire nor people power to do so.

Are the usage analytics available to package maintainers? What about in downstream taps such as Homebrew-Versions and Homebrew-Science? Would be nice to know when it comes to grant writing time.

We can make them available on request. Email me.

Opt-out tracking is unjustifiable no matter how convenient it may be for the developer.

Still not a good enough reason for analytics to be opt-out.

You could do that with anonymous stats instead of tracking an advertising ID to each user.

Couldn't you just look at the download numbers instead?

We don't host any non-binary downloads so: no.

The fact that analytics are opt-out, not opt-in is my biggest beef with brew.

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