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Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

> Why does a package manager need to track their users at all?

According to https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics they use it to measure how often formulas fail to install, to get overall metrics on which OS versions are used, and to correlate those (i.e. to tell on which OS versions specific packages fail to install correctly).

> A maintainer has no need to know who's installing what

Aside from the IP, they don't know who's installing what, and in the new model announced in this post they now don't store IPs or any other user token at all, so it should be purely anonymous aggregate metrics.

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I agree that they don't need to know the "who", but it is perfectly understandable that they want to know "what" is being installed. And as part of the "what", they would want to know on which platform, and whether the install succeeded or failed, and probably a few other metrics about the install to ensure that things are working correctly and identify gaps that should be filled.

Based on what I read on the site, that looks like exactly what they are doing, and they are explicitly NOT storing information that would identify "who".

They can already gleen a lot of this since they run the hosted formula db anyway. A 90-day analytics capture isn't a big deal IMO.

Correct: there's no identifiable information being stored, either before or with these changes.

Aside from the IP? IP nowadays is all you need…

They've been quite clear about what they store and it's not IPs.

I think nowadays IP is less and less relevant when majority of people sit on dynamic IPs

All stuff that should be in a trouble ticket from a whiney user. Which we know this type of user would be.

Edit-Also, this is for Mac OS. Chose a few standard OSes to support and test them. If a system update will fix the issue then it shouldn't be fixed at the package manager level.

Much rather deal with anonymized telemetry blowing up than tickets from whiney ass users.

Does anybody put a paywall in front of submitting tickets? Seems like homebrew could if anybody. Ie $10 to submit and might need more for a larger problem.

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