I'm curious why releasing data in this fashion is troubling? It think this kind of public data sharing in an open-source project is good, since it builds transparency. A top-N list seems like a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem, similar to other package managers. Without any other identifiable information like email addresses, it seems near impossible to de-anonymize statistical usage from this set.
Interesting; I don't see apt, dpkg, nix, or yum maintainers releasing top lists of packages. Even the package providers rarely provide a "top" list, especially one with compile-time flags.
Those flags being provided in this list are very explicit, which could be easily correlated with data provided (or harvested) by other parties.
> a good way to measure the health of the Homebrew ecosystem
What value does this really provide to the general public, other than a, ahem, "member" measuring contest? You already see this occurring in this very thread - the MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comments. I fully expect a "Node vs. X" one as well.
