11–20 of 314 posts
Macports
I didn't dig into the process for a user to add their own ports, or share new ports with a team, in order to more fully compare the two packagers, but that ticket stood out to me
If I had to use a Mac my solutions would be to alway use Docker, a virtual machine, or a remote dev environment of some kind.
You can disable autoupdate by setting HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE env https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/7d31a70373edae4d8e78d9...
This seems to control whether to upgrade homebrew itself?
You can disable autoupdate by setting HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE env https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/7d31a70373edae4d8e78d9...
nix has a very steep learning curve, but I have been using it on macOS for a while now. Can’t recommend it enough. Even started using it on my personal PC, which allows me to use the same nix flake on both systems. EDIT: Personal PC is running NixOS not Windows.
Some other downsides:
- Nix installations can take time. Nix packages can either build from source, or download from a binary cache. If it's not in the cache, it will build from source.
- Nix can take up a significant of storage space.
However, e.g. Nix is amazing at rolling back package installs; and installing a package with nix won't ever break another package installed by nix.
If you like the phrases "pure/immutable", "declarative", "functional programming", etc. then you'll like Nix. -- If those words don't excite you, then you'll not like Nix.
1. Nix has very limited support for GUI applications of the kind that you'd find in `brew cask`. Not no support, some of them are there, but limited support compared to brew. If you use brew as an out-of-the-box install-everything setup like me, you'll not be able to replicate that easily with Nix.
2. Nix can't currently build Swift applications because of some Xcode something I didn't fully understand.
3. I found a small number of packages that are broken on Nix on my aarch64 / M1 MacBook Air (and marked broken, so when you try to install it complains) and a small number that are broken without being marked broken. In specific, I think R was one that surprised me -- this is a major programming language and although the build requirements are onerous (it's a mix of C and Fortran), I would think it would work.
That being said the actual process of installing, updating, and upgrading seems much faster and dramatically less shitty than homebrew, and so I recommend migrating stuff off of brew anyway.
- Homebrew is rolling - always was and never claimed otherwise.
- OTOH for key packages (say databases) it has available versioned bottles. for postgresql one have:
- postgresql@10
- postgresql@12
- postgresql@9.4
- postgresql@9.6
- postgresql (points to latest)
- postgresql@11
- postgresql@13
- postgresql@9.5
In short, none of what happened to the OP is due to inherent flaws in homebrew... QED.