IMO packages like virtualenv should be brought in by a local python that's installed, not brew.
Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
221–230 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#222I'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…
Macports made my life hard three times I upgraded OSes from having to migrate Macports versions, just leaving broken files in /usr/local/*. The worst instance was Mavericks, when it suddenly said i had no ports, after 10 years on the same image. It did something similar during the Monterey update. I'm now 100% brew but still have broken artefacts from MacPorts littering my system. I'm also still using the same image from 2012, moved to new machines with TimeMachine, so that could be it, but I'm damned stubborn.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#223I 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
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…
What's 'deletionism'?
Is it the act of being fastidious regarding everything under '/usr'? If so, count me in.
One of my biggest gripes with the aged Linux install ritual is having to keep the source bundle forever in case I ever decide to uninstall. Why? Because the autoconf makefile is the only rule that cleans up all the bins, docs, and shared files that were sprayed into the OS. Building from source needs an uninstall fix, but no one seems to care. (Or I simply don't understand how w/o keeping the build folder forever... Help?)
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#224I 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
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…
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Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#225I started using nix. It’s difficult and search results are not often helpful.
Fight through it for another couple of weekends - the Stockholm syndrome feels sooo gooooood!
I found it much more helpful to find people's own Nix setups and learn from them, by the way. Mine is at https://github.com/Smaug123/nix-dotfiles - like all such things, it's a WIP, and I'm definitely still a noob, but bits of it may be able to help.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#226I started using nix. It’s difficult and search results are not often helpful.
you can search via web interface - https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=nixpkgs-unstable
Finding packages is not the hard bit :P the hard bit is learning how to do anything. The Pills teach you how the language and "runtime" works, but nixpkgs is gargantuan and requires a whole lot of extra learning, as is home-manager, as is nix-darwin.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#227The same thing happened to me when I upgraded vim ! I thought why the heck would postgres requires an upgrade if I was upgrading vim's minor version ! It took ages...
EDIT: for me this is a minor issue. i'll continue using `brew` as it does the job quite well
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#228Why are you using virtualenv instead of `python3 -m venv`?
Just wondering.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’d be nice if it asked if it’s ok to remove old versions of dependencies when installing a new package. It’d also be nice for it to not upgrade, say, wireshark and nginx when installing, say, ffmpeg, without asking first.
You might be interested in `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP` and `HOMEBREW_NO_CLEANUP_FORMULAE`. See `man brew` for details.
Yeah, I’m going to put those in my rc file. I’m surprised they aren’t the default options but that’s not a big deal.
Re: Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
#230Homebrew 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.
Did you use brew outdated after performing brew update?
brew outdated will list outdated app/dependencies that need to be updated. If you want to know the app's dependencies, use the info argument. For example brew info ffmpeg will list the information about FFmpeg and list the dependencies that it uses along with status indication if the dependencies is installed or not.
Am I missing something here? I am not sure if it is a UI problem since Homebrew have those functions with a few arguments here and there. Look like you are using a utility that have so much dependencies that it needs or you have habit of using brew upgrade which will prompt to upgrade everything expect pinned apps/dependencies.