[chongli]

What kind of decisions do you make based on the analytics? Do you drop unpopular packages? To me, one of the advantages of a package manager is having a huge database of long-tail packages that are just one command away. If you kept only the popular packages you might as well just have an installer that installs them all together in bulk.

[woodruffw]

> Do you drop unpopular packages?

Yes: Homebrew deprecates and/or disables packages if we see evidence that they're unmaintained and not actually supported on the platforms we support, or only used by a tiny fraction of users while also requiring disproportionate maintainer time (e.g. due to complex or flaky builds).

The goal is to balance conflicting user interests: 99% of users want maintainer effort focused on the top 100 (or 500, or 1000) packages, and many of those packages also require significant maintainer effort (e.g. making sure that they don't cause transitive breakages).

[chongli]

So if a package has a small community of users and is well-maintained upstream but not popular overall you'll keep it around?

[woodruffw]

Generally speaking, yes: we don't remove things that aren't disproportionately burdensome. You can see that in the yearly analytics[1]: there are packages that only get a few dozen downloads a year, and we don't remove them because they don't cause any issues.

[1]: https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/install/365d/

[chongli]

That's good to hear! I think small, well-maintained projects with loyal users can add tremendous value to a package ecosystem due to the long tail effect. I believe these long tail effects are a big part of the reason behind the staying power of tools like emacs, vim, and LaTeX.

[woodruffw]

I agree completely!