homebrew's top 1000 requested installs

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Nov 29, 2017, at 11:42 AM, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> in case anyone is curious what people are requesting.
> MacPorts has almost all of these, I thought, glancing down the list.
> 
> https://brew.sh/analytics/install-on-request/

A bunch of random discussion at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164439

Several people were vocally concerned about privacy…but clearly _many_ allow their stats to be collected.  Many of the concerns were that Homebrew was using Google for data analysis.  

Obligatory link to our similar-but-stalled initiative:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/StatisticsIdeas

As I recall, privacy was a big stumbling block when we last discussed this.  I would argue that Homebrew’s experience shows that not that many people are actually concerned with anonymous data collection—especially if we don’t use Google for the analysis.  As a maintainer, I would *really* like to have even the roughest inkling of how many users there are of a particular port.  I obsoleted a couple of ports recently without the slightest idea how many systems they are currently installed on.

BTW, Homebrew doesn’t collect any information on the OS environment:

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md

I’d like to understand at least which OS version my ports are being installed onto.  Again, that would help a lot with deciding how much effort to put into supported older systems.

I think it is fair to ask our users to provide anonymized stats so that we can make better decisions on the packaging work we do on their behalf.  

Craig