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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?

#241

Post by rbanffy »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #63
da39a3ee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no help for problems such as how the main developers seriously thought it was fine to have a user account own a shared system directory for many years, until Apple finally just took control over that at the OS level and forced them to figure out some marginally less borken arrangement. Macports is a tougher sell for an average user today simply because the disparity in popularity means macports library is sm…

> until Apple finally just took control over that at the OS level and forced them to figure out some marginally less borken arrangement.

This was my biggest complaint about Homebrew. Does it mean it was finally fixed?

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

#242

Post by n8henrie »

da39a3ee wrote: post #24

Why did you want to `brew install virtualenv`? That’s no longer the current way to work with python. Virtual environments are now in the standard library: python -m venv /my/directory I’ve never had any problem with homebrew in over a decade’s usage. But yes, don’t use it for python development tooling: use pyenv and python -m venv and pip for that.

Absolutely. Brew manages pyenv, pyenv manages Python versions, venv manages Python packages / projects. Has been very reliable for the last decade or so, with my only complaint being the need for special linker flags when installing a new Python (homebrew openssl path etc), esp if doing an `--enable-optimizations` build (which I definitely recommend in the long run).

brew install pyenv pyenv install 3.9.7 cd ~/myproject pyenv local 3.9.7 python3.9 -m venv --upgrade-deps .venv source ./.venv/bin/activate

You're off to the races. (I think I got that --upgrade-deps flag right.)

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

#244

Post by mdaniel »

jd3 wrote: post #170
mdaniel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It appears those links made the same assumption as did @alnja8a in the sibling comment: my concern is not, at this moment, bugs in pkgsrc itself rather my concern is with tracking who is working on fixing (in our example at hand) awscli-v2

Now, maybe if I go trawling through mailing lists or (shudder) IRC I can find out what the status is, but that's beyond my level of energy expenditure for some niche packaging system

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

#245

Post by alexchantavy »

pxc wrote: post #195
ethbr0 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, the problem is that Python's packaging system (like Homebrew's!) was created without adequate reference to prior art, has undergone much more evolution than design, and has suffered in every attempt to improve it from the fact of its adoption by a large userbase which democratically manages it so that changes must be conservative. As a result, Python packaging has an utterly insane design that it can't evolve its…

> No, the problem is that Python's packaging system (like Homebrew's!) was created without adequate reference to prior art

What's a good example of prior art that Python might have considered in its design? This whole discussion is super interesting to me and I'd like to read more on better examples of dependency management.

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

#246

Post by mdaniel »

kergonath wrote: post #190
mdaniel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, one will observe that brew manages to package it, without any similar stone throwing about the project's "hatred for pypi" or other meta commentary. It seems every project has *some* kind of quirk, but if the packaging system pays that cost once, then its users get "brew install awscli" instead of waiting 18 months for the AWS team to "see the error of their ways" or whatever one is expecting to change about that situation

I apologize if "puritan" was too emotionally loaded of a word that hurt people's feelings -- I didn't think "strict" was the right word but maybe I should have used "opinionated?"

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

#247

Post by da39a3ee »

rbanffy wrote: post #241
Brian_K_White wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no help for problems such as how the main developers seriously thought it was fine to have a user account own a shared system directory for many years, until Apple finally just took control over that at the OS level and forced them to figure out some marginally less borken arrangement. Macports is a tougher sell for an average user today simply because the disparity in popularity means macports library is sm…

> until Apple finally just took control over that at the OS level and forced them to figure out some marginally less borken arrangement. This was my biggest complaint about Homebrew. Does it mean it was finally fixed?

It seems to install into /opt/homebrew/ now, whereas previously it used /usr/local.

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

#248

Post by ronenlh »

abathur wrote: post #43
Majestic121 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your honesty is refreshing. I've seen countless people trying a new technology/tool, and overselling it as 'amazing' and super easy. Seeing a post like yours helps to keep the discussion grounded in reality, with tools that looks nice on paper but have practical downsides as well.

I agree with this general sentiment, but I'll add that it's worth reading most posts about Nix through this lens. Finding your sea legs is rough, and IME people who completely deny this are few and far between. The reward is a pretty impressive lever.

The thing I use and like most in nix is nix-shell.

I set up a shell.nix file on my projects, and together with direnv the environment switches with the right dependencies for each project.

Shameless plug, I wrote about this recently on medium: https://link.medium.com/cYkKMtdHRkb

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

#249

Post by rbanffy »

da39a3ee wrote: post #247
rbanffy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until Apple finally just took control over that at the OS level and forced them to figure out some marginally less borken arrangement. This was my biggest complaint about Homebrew. Does it mean it was finally fixed?

It seems to install into /opt/homebrew/ now, whereas previously it used /usr/local.

That’s progress.

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

#250

Post by bpiche »

asdf_snar wrote: post #135
da39a3ee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cask project supports large binaries and projects whose licenses are a little more poisonous than your standard brew libs. tap as far as I can tell is basically the same as PPA extensions in linux, it lets you install stuff from external repo lists. PPAs were pretty standard fare when I used to use linux more often, maybe working with package managers in your distro of choice for a while will help. In practice you usually don't need to use either cask or tap 99% of the time.
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