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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to improve a product if you don’t know how it’s being used.

Is it a product?

An Open Source or not-for-profit product is still a product, and we do ourselves no favors pretending otherwise.

What is a product? They make something that is used by others, and if they follow a product development mindset, calling it a product is fair in my opinion.

s/product/tool … the meaning remains the same.

By literal definition, yes.

What if a product is finished and needs no further improvements? And even if it isn't, isn't it better to talk do your users and find out their pain points with your product directly, instead of trying to guess at them from analytics data?

The only improvement I personally want for Homebrew is for library packages to never include version numbers in the dynamic library file names.

If you're a company with lots of money and you can pay employees to do so, then sure.

Homebrew is an open source project solving a fairly complex problem with volunteer maintainers. Analytics are constant and measurable signal on all sorts of things and can be used both proactively and reactively to deal with an array of concerns from user experience issues to bad rollouts.

> isn't it better to talk do your users and find out their pain points with your product directly, instead of trying to guess at them from analytics data?

you're trivializing a very big and complicated issue. why not both?

what is worse - anonymous usage statistics or needing to sign up with an email address to get notified of surveys and whatnot. one is passive, one is active.

it's also about more than just feature improvements... brew runs on a ton of different platforms/environments (https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/30d/) and having this data helps prioritize the efforts of open source developers.

without analytics data you are flying blind.

Unless Apple decides to stop updating MacOS, homebrew can't be "finished" just abandoned.

There is no meaningful sense in which Homebrew is (or ever will be) "finished": it's constantly being updated with new package versions, by both demand and design.

Analytics are an essential burden-reducing component of the Homebrew maintenance workflow; the maintainers would not have time to make improvements like the one you're requesting if they spent their time on the things that analytics do for them.

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