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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?

#171

Post by fredsted »

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_…

On Debian-based systems, I get a preview of what's going to be installed/updated when I do something with `apt`.

With homebrew, I never know how many packages will be updated and how long it will take, so sometimes when I just need a small utility, suddenly it'll update a bunch of packages and it takes 45 minutes.

It's a UI problem.

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

#172

Post by systemvoltage »

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_…

Been using homebrew for many years, thanks. Although, I think the permissions model is broken. I wish Homebrew supported multiple accounts. On my macbook m1, all accounts point to /opt/homebrew and it is a giant ball of mess. Modifying the prefix to ~/homebrew leads to other packages that hard code the path such as pyenv.

I think we need a new package manager since its not the fault of homebrew that many packages have hardcoded stuff in there.

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

#173

Post by physicsguy »

I'm surprised I've not seen Spack mentioned here. Spack especially is great for home installs. It's aimed mostly at HPC cluster users, who by default need multiple versions of compiler toolchains, programming languages, libraries, but works well on Mac too.

I hate it, but Anaconda might work too, so long as it's not a corporate laptop where you need a license.

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

#174

Post by systemvoltage »

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,…

Yes, agreed. Someone asked if there can be a progress bar on Homebrew. Instantly shutdown the thread.

Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time.

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

#175

Post by slightwinder »

glintik wrote: post #17

I think, you don't need to choose any other package manager because homebrew is the most mature thing on macos. Just disable autoupdate when installing something: HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install

This looks like a really awful solution. Does homebrew not ask the users on each run whether they want update something and warns them about the dangers? Like a responsible software?

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

#176

Post by abzug »

jt2190 wrote: post #36
abzug wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the fact that it "needs" Xcode installed.

If my pre-coffee memory is correct, Macports only needs command-line tools for XCode. xcode-select --install That said, MacPorts is often opinionated , e.g. they package certain versions of some software and not others.

I just said what's on the "Installing MacPorts" section of the site: https://www.macports.org/install.php

> 1. Install Xcode and the Xcode Command Line Tools

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

#177

Post by andra_nl »

ratww wrote: post #83
civilized wrote: post #60

A lot of the usual "it's bad" "it's not bad for me" discourse in these threads. Could people raise the bar a bit and talk about specific problems they have had with homebrew - other than the auto-update, which we've already noted can be changed by setting HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1? Thanks.

It's hard to pinpoint what the problem really is, but me and a few colleagues had corrupted brew installations lately, where various things would just randomly stop working after updating a single package. The trick of disabling auto updates doesn't really work when you do want things to be updated. Sometimes there are conflicts and the usual path was to upgrade everything. Not that it matters: it seems that the usua…

Could you give (or point to) a description how compiling binaries using GitHub Actions can be done? Sounds really nice. :)

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

#178

Post by ryandrake »

whalesalad wrote: post #100

It’s a strategy. Package managers have to choose a strategy: slow, crusty and stable or bleeding edge? It’s not CentOS… it’s a local dev machine. The same scenario will occur on Arch Linux. Fortunately Homebrew has lots of helper scripts to upgrade DB’s like Postgres. You probably saw some scroll back with a command to upgrade from 12 to 13 or 13-14 etc. It will even download and install an old version in order to up…

It would be nice if you could run Homebrew in a mode where dependencies were statically linked if possible. On my system, "brew list | wc" shows 200 installed packages, and "brew leaves | wc" shows that I actually only intended to install 32 of them. This is a huge dependency tree full of junk I don't even know if I actually need. Static linking would save a lot of space and make your list of installed packages simpler and more understandable.

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

#179

Post by smoldesu »

physicsguy wrote: post #169
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

...because your other 156 gigs are being eaten up by Xcode. Seriously, why the hell does Apple even sell 256gb laptops these days?

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

#180

Post by saagarjha »

chimen wrote: post #41

This si literally why docker exists. I would never install something on a system and then complain it is being updated from time to time. The system needs to stay safe and follow a path of updates in order to cover vulnerabilities and such. Put it in docker and version lock it.

Docker performs pretty poorly on macOS.
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