User error. You should have known about pinning versions. If this is the reason you want to change package managers, you should consider this. Either that or maybe macOS isn't the OS for you. Try gentoo.
Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
131–140 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#132Homebrew project leader here: I hope you're able to find a package manager that better fits your needs and I'm sorry that Homebrew is not currently doing so.
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Homebrew upgrades dependencies and dependents of those dependencies (which, admittedly, can feel like unrelated) on installation and upgrade. As mentioned in other comments, you can customise this behaviour with `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE` or `HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE`.
Homebrew does this because the alternative is sometimes breaking things. An example:
- you want to install `virtualenv` that depends on `python@3.10`
- the binary package for `virtualenv` you want requires the newest `python@3.10`
- this upgrades `python@3.10` on installation
Now, Homebrew has a choice. Either we upgrade _everything_ that depends on `python@3.10` that you have installed or we knowingly break some of the things you have installed that depend on `python@3.10`. We choose the safer option by default.
The more time left between updating/upgrading, the more likely to have more dependencies updated which requires more dependents to be updated.
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Regardless, I appreciate this is a problem and we're still figuring out potential solutions for this problem. A reminder that we're a volunteer run project so it's not always as easy as we'd like it to be to get these changes out quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#133I just reached the same breaking point -- and normally I am pretty sympathetic to software jank, but the maintainer of homebrew is so actively hostile and rude that my degree of empathy is significantly less -- and switched to Nix, which is quite good, conditional on three gotchas: 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,…
I also tried Nix (as well as NixOS) but it's obviously difficult to use and has a very steep learning curve. But actually it might be the most flexible and stable package manager out there. So probably the problems mentioned can be fixed by custom configuration but that might require deep-diving into Nix and using Functional Programming for package configs... For some time I also used to just ./configure && make && m…
I think the problem with Nix is that it is actually not a package manager but a build tool (that provides some package management utilities). People try Nix with the assumption that it should be as easy as apt-get (for example), but found tutorials with a block of code in a weird language...
Sure, you will eventually need to use the Nix language if you want to have complex and reusable configurations, but this is actually not needed for beginners! To install packages, you need the Nix package manager (with channels already setup) and use `nix-env` to install for the current user. You can just search for the package in https://search.nixos.org/packages and use the command directly.
If you want to have user configurations, use home-manager, just modify the example to add other options, you seldom need complicated Nix expressions unless you need to build a package by yourself.
When you really need to do so, you may want to have a look at other's build script, and make sure you understand everything in the build process, including compile dependencies and runtime dependencies, environment variables, etc. You may want to read Nix Pills at some point, but maybe you can get away with reading just the relevant section (incomplete knowledge, but usually enough to get the work done).
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#134You can install Gentoo in a prefix on OSX. I used to do that.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#135My experience is that both (Macports, Homebrew) are comically unreliable and frustrating to use. That said, with my insistence to install under $HOME, Macports seems to work slightly better. But truly, I got the best results from downloading and compiling every single flipping dependency myself.
Homebrew isn’t unreliable — I’ve used it for more than a decade with no problem. What’s an actual problem you have with it? Perhaps others here could help you.
I'll repeat what others have said above, but perhaps with more emphasis on the layperson's perspective.
I think I started using homebrew some 4+ years ago. I have no idea what a cask, tap, pour, or whatever is. At first things "just worked" and it was great.
Then came the couple of afternoons where I had an important project to finish, and I had to upgrade X. I think once it was matplotlib (for which I had to upgrade pip? ... I can't remember) or something silly like that. Everything broke, I had to reinstall all my python packages (that's when I moved to pyenv), and I did not finish my work on time. There was probably an easier way, but I was (am) a newb and I didn't know how.
I remember brew was one of the first command line utilities I ever used and thought, "woah, that was easy _and_ cool!", but I no longer think I am the target audience.
Someone might say the onus is on me to learn more about the tools I use, and they are probably right. I need to know my .tmux.conf or .zshrc or whatever to get the most out of those, too, and sometimes I like to dive in. For the most part, I just want to Get On With My Work and be oblivious.
If you could provide some guidance, I would genuinely be grateful. For a newbie like myself, when I see comments like "just set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1" and then back and forth on why that does and doesn't work, I decide I don't have time for this today and cross my fingers I don't need to brew install anything in the near future. And if I do, I will probably avoid it (because it will take, I don't know, hours?).
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#136I gave up on brew and other package systems like it a long time ago. I found it far, far easier to install Ubuntu 20.04 and use that as a utility machine.
Even on a system like that, many times when I interact with package managers like conda, it ends up compiling some huge package from scratch. I consider that a failure.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
For PostgreSQL on macOS I use and suggest https://postgresapp.com/ which is free and able to manage multiple Postgres major versions. It's also self-contained in a folder in /Applications. Also, version 14 of Postgres in the app has m1 native support.
For “infrastructure” apps like databases, caches, etc, I’ve been using Docker containers. Very easy to setup and tear down in a repeatable way. Unless I’m modifying the app itself, of course.
For me it’s the only sane way to manage multiple small projects. A few lines in a docker compose file and I’m done, no matter the Postgres/Python/Ruby/Lib or framework version, everything is isolated and reproductible. Downside is gigabytes of RAM wasted.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel your pain, but can't help blaming Apple rather than Homebrew. They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features, homebrew is merely following their lead and focusing on bleeding edge users. Maybe the logic is: if you don't want constant churn you wouldn't be on a mac.
> They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features I thought the story was that Apple had a problem with GNU licensing, and that was the reason everything got locked to ~2007 software, forcing everyone who wants to use bash and GNU utils to resort to a package manager. Yeah… googling it, people have long been saying GPL v3 is what Apple has a problem with: http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/a…
What you're talking about has nothing to do with what GP said.
Apple cheerily breaks functionality for end users when they decide to remove or replace APIs on every major release of macOS. This tends to hit power users especially hard, as they often use tools that extend Apple's narrow facilities for things like handling keyboard input, managing windows, or controlling applications' audio volume through third-party tools that rely on internals of macOS that are not supposed to be public-facing, and those get broken more often. If your favorite tool relies on an API that gets pulled and doesn't (or can't) get rewritten when the new macOS release is in beta, you're SOL.
Homebrew breaking on macOS upgrade is also due to one thing that's fundamental to Homebrew's design, which is that it tries to rely as much as possible on that same external base system which Apple provides but destructively revises whenever it sees fit. (This design choice is apparently the author of Homebrew made because relative independence from the base system meant too much recompiling for him on Homebrew's competitors at the time.)
Package managers are used to install a hell of a lot more than bash. The idea that they wouldn't be necessary on macOS if only no popular tools were licensed under the GPLv3 is laughable.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#139pacman
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#140After years of dealing with it I just run most of the software from docker containers and use homebrew for random cli tools.
Homebrew needs to do a better job of communicating that you shouldn't use it for project dependencies, because every time there's a Brew thread on here, a bunch of people come out complaining about this kind of thing. "Homebrew broke my build by updating PostgreSQL and Redis". They shouldn't need to communicate that, but clearly, they do. Use Docker, probably. Homebrew is for your tools , not your dependencies . Is t…
Genuinely, is this attested as the project philosophy anywhere?
Because right now https://brew.sh leads with "The Missing Package Manager for macOS", which would lead anyone to think it does the same as a package manager for Linux, and they're _full_ of developer dependency packages.