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Comment by opaque_salmon | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why releasing data in this fashion is troubling? It think this kind of public data sharing in an open-source project is good, since it builds transparency. A top-N list seems like a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem, similar to other package managers. Without any other identifiable information like email addresses, it seems near impossible to de-anonymize statistical usage from this set.

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> similar to other package managers

Interesting; I don't see apt, dpkg, nix, or yum maintainers releasing top lists of packages. Even the package providers rarely provide a "top" list, especially one with compile-time flags.

Those flags being provided in this list are very explicit, which could be easily correlated with data provided (or harvested) by other parties.

> a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem

What value does this really provide to the general public, other than a, ahem, "member" measuring contest? You already see this occurring in this very thread - the MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comments. I fully expect a "Node vs. X" one as well.

Helps to find packages which I might have missed from other sources. LWN is good, but doesnt cover everything.

Debian publishes statistics gathered by the optional "popularity-contest" package at http://popcon.debian.org

I can't remember whether the default is opt-out or in with the current installer.

It prompts if you want to install it.

It also doesn't sent data to a privacy abusing company like google.

> It also doesn't sent data to a privacy abusing company like google.

Actually the data is sent to Google.

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