Devenv Telemetry Warning | Hacker News Reader

Devenv Telemetry Warning

chaos.social

40 pointstodsacerdoti10 comments

I'm out, that's it for using devenv in my stuff.

I was already put off by the way devenv uses direnv to pull down its nix logic. The latest version I'm willing to use (1.3?) at least hardcodes a permalink to a file in GitHub. The latest version apparently just sets your .envrc to run a non-deterministic devenv command to download and run god-knows-what.

devenv suddenly wresting control of what happens when I cd to my project is unacceptable, especially given this new insistence on telemetry.

Be sure to put your env vars next to the invocation and not at the start, or it won't apply.

Like for npm, correct way is

  "./bin/do.sh && NO_TELEMETRY=1 vendor build"

Incorrect:

  "NO_TELEMETRY=1 ./bin/do.sh && vendor build"

With the latter, the environment variable to disable telemetry doesn't get passed in to the vendor script.

you missed the part this still sends all the data regadless

Yes, still sending the data is bad.

Their docs [1] do not mention the generate command can take an exclusion argument [2]. Maybe the dot (.) for current directory will exclude everything, but that may defeat the purpose.

If the current directory were the default, and on first run an error message like "Please include files first" appeared--and users also must enter "Y" at a disclaimer message--they could explicitly opt in instead.

And that should be placed before the tar-n-upload piece.

The pull request was also merged before approval. Github branch protection could have been set to require at least one approver.

[1] https://devenv.sh/blog/2025/02/13/devenv-14-generating-nix-d...

[2] https://github.com/cachix/devenv/blob/main/devenv/src/cli.rs...

Okay honestly, at what point in time creeped that telemetry "I need all your data for totally no reason but I feel like I should collect it anyways to satisfy my desire to spy on you" fetish (generally) into software?

My first (broad) contact with something like that was in the early 2000 with a certain operating system, which decided it needs to check an ID online before allowing me to use it.

Anyone can recommend an alternative?

My use case is to simply setup the development environment when I cd into the folder (e.g., compiler, language server).

It seems to me that manually creating a flake.nix is the most sensible approach.

I've used Devbox by Jetify for two years. Never looked back.

https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox

Devenv got pointless after LLMs.

"Enable JavaScript in my flake.nix" outputs whatever basic packages I need, without the magic.

It sends the output of “git ls-files” to the telemetry server?!?! Who thought this is appropriate.

No even worse, it sends the actual file content to the server.

Linked in the post:

https://github.com/cachix/devenv/blob/6c987a8795eedea872afe4...

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