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Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#161

Post by dehrmann »

yakkers wrote: post #52

I've personally had very good experiences switching back from Homebrew to MacPorts. Wouldn't go back to Homebrew. I find it much faster now, which is quite funny to me because back when Homebrew was new (and a lot less opinionated) it was much faster than MacPorts, especially with the bottles (binary packages) feature. Today, MacPorts has binary packages, doesn't randomly force incredibly slow updates when I just wan…

I also switched back after one too many issues with brew file ownership and permissions.

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#162

Post by pxc »

zzbzq wrote: post #37
Apreche wrote: post #12

The fact that homebrew is awful is one of the huge reasons I don’t use MacOS for development like all my co-workers. Instead I use Windows with WSL because the company won’t allow me a Linux laptop. 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.

Funny, I use Windows with WSL and the first thing I do when I set up a new WSL instance is get homebrew (linuxbrew) and install everything else through that if available. apt/dpkg and any other package manager that scatters files all over the filesystem is just an absolute disaster that--if you do a lot of R&D tinkering--eventually renders a computer unusable after a few years. That's what happened to my first WSL in…

> apt/dpkg and any other package manager that scatters files all over the filesystem is just an absolute disaster that--if you do a lot of R&D tinkering--eventually renders a computer unusable after a few years. That's what happened to my first WSL instance; no apt command would work anymore because it had broken its own dependencies.

This is the craziest claim that I've ever heard about package management, I think

I would love to hear a more complete story

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#163

Post by apostacy »

da39a3ee wrote: post #26
notafraudster wrote: post #18

I 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,…

What’s an actual concrete example of a problem you have with homebrew?

I know that there are usually workarounds to these problems, but they tend to be obscure, and change frequently, and are not simple to look up.

Pacman, apt, portage, etc have much more stable interfaces. But the workarounds for my edge cases in Homebrew from a year ago don't work anymore. Even knowing what is an edgecase or not is a problem.

Most of these issues would be fine if the interface changed as slowly and consistently as Linux package managers.

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#164

Post by beowulfey »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #132

Homebrew 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. --- 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_…

First, wanted to say thanks for heading a wonderful project. I personally love Homebrew!

What’s the difference in what Homebrew is doing from what normally happens with something like Pacman or Apt? My impression is that “core” binaries, like Python might be, don’t get updated as often as they would on Homebrew, and perhaps those dependency chains are less frequent. Is it because (e.g.) python versions change rarely on linux package managers? Or something about how the binaries are compiled?

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#165

Post by ethbr0 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #157
mikemcquaid wrote: post #132

Homebrew 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. --- 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_…

yeah really unfair to blame a package manager for being unexpected when the context is installing/updating a python package. Don't care what package manager you use, python is always going to be a mess

> python is always going to be a mess

The irony is that poster was trying to install a solution to this very problem (virtualenv).

The broader problem is that, at this point, python is effectively its own OS. Coupled with macOS being schizophrenic between "We want to provide a posix environment for users" and "No user should ever look under the hood, so no need to tell them about all the duct taped bits."

Which brew attempts to bridge. Admirably, but never perfectly.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1987/

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#166

Post by [deleted] »

pxc wrote: post #138
dahart wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#167

Post by ayewo »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #128
jolux wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, terrible misfeature. Why is that the default? I could maybe understand it if it were just dependencies, but upgrading everything is insane.

It doesn't upgrade everything. It upgrades dependencies and dependents of those dependencies (which, admittedly, can feel like everything). It does this because the alternative is sometimes breaking things. A "breaking things without this example": - you want to install something that depends on `readline` - the binary package for the thing you want requires the latest `readline` - this upgrades `readline` on install…

I'm inclined to agree, but it seems Ubuntu's solution to this problem with "apt install [-y]" where you are presented with a list of dependencies that will get upgraded if you choose to proceed is a much better trade off.

The user can of course ignore the dependencies notice by specifying the "-y" flag to force an installation.

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#168

Post by apostacy »

pxc wrote: post #138
dahart wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

If you have any kind complex toolchains, then a major update can be a real burden.

Just for me, using a customized desktop, iOS app development, and being a zfs user means that I had to set aside a lot of time for updates.

And beyond that, Apple has become really sloppy with new releases, and you're best off waiting at least six months for the major bugs to be ironed out.

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#169

Post by physicsguy »

sswastioyono18 wrote: post #79

I'm surprised people still use postgresql from homebrew. Like honestly, I use brew for any CLI command only like zsh and git. Well maybe some programming language as well but I would never, ever install database with it unless I'm desperate. Anything that can be dockerized, just use docker.

If you've only got a Mac with 256gb of storage, then throwing away ~100gb on containers is a nightmare

Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

#170

Post by jd3 »

mdaniel wrote: post #40
yakubin wrote: post #30

A while ago there was a post on HN about pkgsrc [1][2][3], which works on Mac, among other platforms. I haven't tried it, but it may be worth a shot. [1]: https://rubenerd.com/using-netbsds-pkgsrc-everywhere-i-can/ > [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293108 > [3]: http://www.pkgsrc.org/ >

I checked and it appears to suffer from the same problem as MacPorts in only making the ancient version of awscli available: http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/net/py-awscl... I wasn't able to immediately find any issue tracker for pkgsrc packages, and it seems they're a "mailing list and IRC" type setup, which if true means it definitely isn't for me

i agree that most people don't want to bother with mailing lists and/or IRC these days, though there are a couple of alternative options

https://www.perkin.org.uk/pages/pkgsrc-binary-packages-for-o...

https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc

https://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd

https://pkgsrc.se/net/py-awscli

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