[slagfart]

There's significant value, when developing a product, in knowing which other products your customers are likely to have, so that you can prioritise your different integrations.

Similar data could probably be compiled from Google Trends, but this clean and authoritative view is something that can be trusted, and I think the result makes the open-source ecosystem stronger.

[falcolas]

That only sets up the value proposition for the maintainers - not for making it public. What value do any of us, not on the Homebrew maintenance team, derive from this list (other than fuel for "X is better than Y" arguments)?

[nwatson]

It informs me of software I didn't know about and yet is popular among presumably mostly developers and power users. I need to know about that.

[stephenr]

There are literally dozens of "how I setup my machine/tools I use" lists and even setup scripts on GitHub.if you "need" to know what others are doing, refer to those. Or ask.

I'll happily tell you my toolset, but I don't use home brew and I wouldn't allow it to send my usage to google even if I did

[marcomonteiro]

Thanks for being so open to sharing. Do you have a blog? How do I find your blog? Before you posted this comment how would I even know to look you up.

Just because someone on the internet had a particular setup doesn't mean I want to follow it. Or that I have time to track down several people's opinions.

Getting install stats directly from the homebrew project, which I know because I use it, is infinitely more useful to me and much more easily discoverable. that's just my opinion though and you're entitled to your own.

[stephenr]

They have a section on this very website, called "Ask HN". It's not uncommon for people to ask for opinions/input on tooling.

That also gives you more context, because it's answering your actual question, rather than trying to answer your own question with a bunch of vaguely related data.

It also handles the dependency issue. Someone asked why imagemagick is so popular, but its probably actually just a dependency for language-level bindings (e.g. php-imagick), not that people are using `convert` or `identify` directly on the CLI.

Heck, consider the case of front-end developers who have a toolset that depends on nodejs. They may never write any server side code, but if they follow recent trends they probably need nodejs for their css/js "toolchain" - the stats don't tell you that though. They just tell you that nodejs is installed a lot.

[mikemcquaid]

> What value do any of us, not on the Homebrew maintenance team, derive from this list

This list was added specifically because a bunch of people expressed concerns about this data not being public. You can please some of the people all of the time, etc.

[always_good]

It's interesting.