[brookst]

Maybe they want to include the most common packages in their unit tests, or understand usage patterns so they can prioritize development?

It’s very hard to write and maintain good software without knowing how it’s used. No package manager needs to know how you specifically use it, but aggregate data and the ability to identify scenarios it does not handle well are both very important for SW lifecycle.

[ianai]

It's 2023. Hard drive space shouldn't be an issue. Test installing the full software suite, make it work, and you know the lesser installs will all work.

[orf]

Do you think “hard drive space” is the constraining factor when building and testing over 6.5k third party packages?

Do you really not see any advantage to maintainers having visibility into what packages people actually use?

[Larrikin]

How much would you be willing to pay so that Homebrew can maintain a large amount of hardware covering nearly all configurations?

[justinclift]

Just checked their OpenCollective, and they seem to have about US$100k there:

https://opencollective.com/homebrew#category-BUDGET

They seem to be receiving about US$2k/month via Patreon too:

https://www.patreon.com/homebrew

I think their Patreon was around the same when I looked ~12 months ago.

[shepherdjerred]

$2k/mo is a terribly low figure for a piece of software that nearly every dev on macOS uses.

[justinclift]

That US$100k seems to have arrived over the last year, and their overheads - from quickly looking over their OpenCollective expenses tab - seem to be mostly buying hardware for CI things, and a monthly GSuite bill.

It's also pretty likely they get a lot of their resources for free / sponsored too.

So, US$2k/mo might be fine (no idea).

[shepherdjerred]

> Test installing the full software suite, make it work

Are you paying for the compute?