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Comment by Spiritus | Hacker News Reader

>So you're going to periodically make maintenance changes to my system without my permission. Goodie.

I suspect this is partly because the cache can consume a huge amount of disk space over time and many users might never run `brew cleanup` or doesn't even know about it. And then wonder where all their disk space has gone.

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Yup, I just deleted 13GB of cache a few days ago.

That would be a great reason to communicate with users in a prominent place in the docs. Sadly, the maintainers seem to always choose to force the user behavior that they see as desirable rather than communicate with users about it. For what is, at bottom, a developer tool this is madness.

Isn't it that what mac is all about ? "We know better, let us do the thinking for you" ?

Not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek or not but we do try to follow the/our perceived Apple approach of "sensible defaults which take the thinking out of using the tool". This means doing things automatically for users and letting them opt-out rather than requiring them to read all our documentation to know how to avoid e.g. a bloated cache directory.

I appreciate it. I can RTFM and figure out how to do a million ad-hoc maintenance chores for the thousand tools I use daily, but I'd rather not have to if those tools care more or less take care of themselves.

And let's be honest, most often Apple does know what's better for the average user.

Git also does internal housekeeping in the background when you pull. Actually most developer tools perform operations on their caches and other internal stores over time without asking or telling you about it, so this shouldn't really be a concern.

(a secret: we copied the time period that Git uses for its periodic housekeeping)

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