[cassianoleal]

Assuming their claims of anonymity are true, they won't be tracking users at all.

I imagine they can get much richer metrics through this as opposed to only tracking downloads on the server side.

I'm not saying I like it. In fact, I plan to keep it disabled. I'm just saying it's a bit naïve to think client-side analytics are the same as server-side download tracking.

[ianai]

Richer how, exactly? I fundamentally don't 'get' what richness they actually need.

If anything they need money, of course, and to know their software works for their users. Prior to release have a test system install the full base, test those packages work, and you know anything less will work too.

[cassianoleal]

I haven't looked at what they're actually collecting, but here's a few things that come to mind:

- Time to install packages - Versions of things - Has the compilation (when required) failed? What dependency versions are installed? - CPU architecture - OS version ...

There's a lot more that can be sent from the client that's not available on the server side.

> I fundamentally don't 'get' what richness they actually need.

That's fine. Perhaps you could ask them instead of ranting about what you don't know or don't 'get' in a public forum?

> to know their software works for their users

Sounds like you're not very far from understanding why they want better telemetry.

> Prior to release (...) and you know anything less will work too.

Things break in unexpected ways. OSs are complex systems and there's a lot of interactions between components. Homebrew's user base is enormous and very diverse. There's 2 different architectures, many OS versions, lots of environment variables that might be set differently in each user's systems, different versions of libraries, ... I could go on but I think you get the picture.

Edit: s/collected/collecting/

[grugagag]

Im okay with sending data to the server if things break and be asked each time to okay it. Is it safe to assume that if no errors or exceptions are encountered nothing should be sent back home?

[cassianoleal]

How can they monitor failure rate if they only track failures though?

[grugagag]

Why does it have to be a rate? Failures counts and failure types are good enough to extrapolate whatever else you need

[afavour]

They really aren't. If a package is downloaded 100k times and fails 1k times it's a very different issue than if it's downloaded 1k times and fails 1k times.

[cratermoon]

https://www.trevorbragdon.com/when-data-gives-the-wrong-solu...