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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?

#181

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

mjhoy wrote: post #101
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,…

I also use Nix, and agree with these caveats. My personal experience is that it can be hard to initially set up Nix, but once you do, it's rock solid. It's particularly great for sharing config across machines. Here's config for my personal dev environment for instance: https://github.com/mjhoy/dotfiles/blob/main/nix/nixpkgs/conf...

I tried Nix while ago when NixOS made news in HN. You are right, it is difficult to set it up. Eventually I give up on it and tried to remove Nix from my macOS, let say it is difficult to remove Nix as well. I tried their command line to remove Nix and it didn't remove it even with sudo. Nix been sitting on my macOS for a month since it couldn't remove it completely. I realized I just have to go to Disk Utility to dismount/remove the Nix VHD and then ran the command line again which finally got it removed from my OS.

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

#182

Post by rch »

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,…

I've just gone through the process of configuring a new MBP with nix-darwin and home-manager, and I'm sold. Keeping my MacOS and my NixOS environments in sync has been a nice bonus.

I still run Homebrew for a couple of services and casks, but I'm down to less than 20 packages still installed that way.

There have been a few points of friction (which I'm used to as a polyglot with lots of active projects), but the community has been very helpful with ironing those out.

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

#184

Post by Syzygies »

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,…

When I choose tools I like to ask "Who has the hardest version of this problem? What are they using?"

I'm reaching the tipping point to adopt Nix, after seeing Nix as an alternative for supporting project after project. The unstated subtext always seems to be "Nix is what the smart kids are using, but it's harder to learn."

Haskell? Same religion. But the joke is that one needs a PhD in category theory to use Haskell at all, and package management has long been a Haskell sore point, yet Nix hasn't taken over.

The Lean Theorem Prover?

https://leanprover.github.io/lean4/doc/make/nix.html

A century ago, Hilbert's program to formalize and automate mathematics was stopped in its tracks by developments in logic such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems. There is a new push involving many leading mathematicians, using the Lean theorem prover. While some imagine computers replacing people, a better model is how a chess grandmaster checks their analysis using computers. Even as the experience of observing computer Go games leads to moments of amazement, as if observing an alien tournament, the role of a human to appreciate and generalize is preserved. Primates have long used tools; our future is to coevolve with machines.

Dependency hell and Gödel's incompleteness are cut of the same fabric. This is where I first read about Nix flakes.

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

#185

Post by apostacy »

handrous wrote: post #129

Brew's package selection is unmatched and it works great for a particular purpose . Keep using it, but stop using your dev machine's system package manager to manage project dependencies. There are a bunch of good reasons not to do that, anyway. For server stuff, probably use Docker. Brew is for your tools you personally use, that you mostly want to be at latest. If a project needs, say, a compiler and library at a s…

Brew used to be much more useful to me. Using brew years ago, it was way less opinionated and more flexible, which was perfect for OSX.

Homebrew's response to criticism seems to be to continually narrow the field of users and the scope of their project, and tell users to use something else.

People are only frustrated because they found it to be so helpful.

But I suppose that it had to mature, or something like that.

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

#186

Post by apostacy »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #121
apostacy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew stinks of over-optimization and deletionism. In contrast to how it used to be, Homebrew now seems designed for people that only want popular bleeding edge packages, and nobody else. If I just wanted to install google-chrome, sublime, and skype, I would use the app store. I used to use Homebrew to install more obscure packages that were useful to me, like Arduino, Processing, and some specialized bluetooth to…

You may be interested in MacPorts, which literally supports back to Tiger. (Some of the stuff they do to make this happen is actually nuts, e.g. https://github.com/macports/macports-legacy-support .)

Awesome, I will check it out.

In my case, it was in 2017, and I remember clearly what happened. Homebrew alerted me about the most recent compatible formula, and what commit it was removed in a week earlier. I was then forced to unshallow the Homebrew repo, revert that commit, and then I could install it. I remember I had a good reason for not updating my OS, and I'm sure it was less than two years old.

It was incredibly frustrating, and took a lot more effort than it was worth. Homebrew already had the ability to find the last good version, it would not have been hard to automate it. There were no taps at the time, I had no choice but to do it manually.

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

#187

Post by pxc »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #140
handrous wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imo you shouldn't use a typical Linux distro package manager for project dependencies either, unless you're only ever gonna deploy every app you're developing on that machine to the same version of the same distro.

This is not because there's anything really wrong with them for what they're designed to do, but they install packages globally, and different projects may want different versions of the same thing.

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

#188

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

systemvoltage wrote: post #174
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.

Homebrew is still here to stay. If Apple provide a package manager, then it likely that people will swarm to that but again it depends on how much capabilities and feature parity it have over other package managers. Microsoft is working on this with their Winget. Homebrew is great for casual and daily users since we don't have to keep hunting for software updates.

And Homebrew does have a progress bar for each app. The bar is for the downloading but other than that, I don't think it need a progress bar for installtion since they are quick to install than using the GUI installation.

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

#189

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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_…

Can't you keep both python 3.10 and python 3.09, for older apps that rely on it? Sure, not optimal, but hard disk space is cheap these days .. Ideally, each app would list hashes of packages it depends on, so that everyone is happy.

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

#190

Post by kergonath »

mdaniel wrote: post #11
throwaway4good wrote: post #4

Macports

One should bear in mind that it seems MacPorts takes a much more puritan approach to packaging than Homebrew, as this 18 month old ticket asking for awscli v2 (and its comment thread) shows: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60452 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

I don’t get how that thread demonstrates what you say. It just looks like awscli 2 is a pain to package; what am I missing?
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