They should not have collected that data in the first place.
If you're new to Homebrew, make sure to set the environment variable HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS to 1 before downloading and installing it. Otherwise, it defaults to spying on you.
Note: Homebrew links to this which tells you how to opt-out before sending any analytics data. Similarly, Homebrew sends no PII and you can trivially view all the data that's being sent and verify this yourself. As a result, I think "spying" is unnecessarily inflammatory language. We wouldn't have these analytics if we didn't need them to run the project.
That's not relevant. In scientific research involving people, participant recruiting and informed consent is the norm, and those studies lead to ground-breaking, life-saving research. Anything other than informed consent is unethical. Opt-out telemetry isn't ok when a large corporation does it, and it isn't ok when a free/libre/open source software project does it. That the Homebrew devs feel the need to spy on all their users in order to get statistically meaningful data means they probably don't know how to properly conduct a research study, too.
Ok, I’ll let the homebrew maintainers that you don’t fund and never will that they just need to launch expensive, labour and time intensive opt-in studies of user behavior modeled after totally comparable clinical trials to understand how the system you’re utilizing for free is used in the real world!
Thanks, this has been super useful. I’m sure the maintainers will be relived.
If the implication is that what you’re doing would be rejected by 99,9% of users if they were asked, then you should reconsider either what you’re doing, or how you’re presenting it to them.
Opt-in can boil down to a simple non defaulted choice during installation.
Can you explain why monitoring user-specific behavior and reporting that to unknown, foreign locations outside of your jurisdiction (for most people) should be allowed in the first place?
I need to install software as quickly as possible. My job isn't to install software, it's to create things with software. The installation time isn't productive. So why does my package manager need to auto-update itself for 1-2 minutes every time I use it, forcing me to wait unnecessarily long and taking me out of my workflow?
Do I need to? Not really, but I certainly want to. I absolutely hate waiting and there's no reason why it cannot be done as fast as my internet speed allows.
> We’ve made many improvements around the new 4.0.0 feature of using JSON files downloaded from formulae.brew.sh for package installation rather than local homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps.
Curious to see the code on this. I read a good blog post a while back about updating how JSON was parsed for significant performance improvements. I wonder if the same concepts could be applied to home brew.
Glad to read that.