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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?

#281

Post by pxc »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #222
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…

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…

Homebrew packages break on major macOS upgrades, too. It's not up to the package managers what Apple does or doesn't rip out on a given release

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

#284

Post by pxc »

rch wrote: post #182
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 comm…

Nix-Darwin is great! I wish the Nix installer on macOS were (a) always multi-user and (b) came with Nix-Darwin, so it could be a more NixOS-like experience out of the box.

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

#285

Post by pxc »

mbesto wrote: post #191
systemvoltage wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time. You are more than welcome to build your own alternative. Homebrew is open source and volunteer run. I'm sure there is a very valid reason requests like this get shot down. No wonder open source maintainers hate dealing with people like you. http://antirez.com/news/129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000746 https://github.com/kossnocorp/etiq…

It seems this is the issue in question: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9186

The maintainer did close they issue but they didn't lock the thread. If there was a very valid reason the request got shot down, it went unstated afaict. (Fair enough if they just don't allow feature requests on the issue tracker, I guess)

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

#286

Post by mekster »

You're doing it wrong.

Use Homebrew only for tools and not for critical services like databases and use a cloud server or local virtualization like VMware Fusion (which is free these days for personal use) to run services because major distro packages have far more eyes to check for stability issues.

I never understand people trying to run every parts of the development environment through a local machine's third party package managers which would forbid anyone else being able to check your work right then as you're only running it as localhost, not to mention the power can be down at any moment you're not using your machine and you can't even switch machine yourself to work from easily.

And then when deploying, you'll be running it on Linux anyway which would likely bring little consistency issues.

Do yourself a favor, either spend $5/mo for a cloud Linux and run your stuff remotely or run a locally virtualized Linux and stop using third party package managers no one is using to run on production.

And you can happily keep Homebrew and also install Homebrew on Linux to have unified tool sets on your Mac and Linux CLI tools.

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

#287

Post by pxc »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #188
systemvoltage wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

Winget isn't really a package manager so much as an installer wrangler and frontend for the Microsoft App store. Of the nearly 30,000 manifest files inside the winget repo, fewer than 150 of them define a single dependency. The rest run executable installers that can do basically anything, or just grab an app from the Microsoft Store. It doesn't do anything to eliminate the chaos of every program doing whatever the fuck it wants to get itself installed or create a common ecosystem of integrated packages, which are the main points of package management.

Winget also lacks most of the core functionality of a package manager, including knowing how to uninstall anything at all. But uninstallation will never work reliably on winget anyway, as long as winget an installer wrangler, because installer wranglers inherit unreliable and bespoke per-package installation/uninstallation procedures from existing Windows apps. After a year and a half in public, Winget is still just Chocolatey but faster and much worse in every other respect.

There's basically nothing on offer on Windows if you want a package manager instead of just some automation wrapping executable installers. (Scoop is the closest thing, and it's sort of just now swinging back from the verge of death after months in limbo.) The fact that Microsoft announced a project and called it a package manager has done more or less nothing to change that.

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

#288

Post by Brian_K_White »

da39a3ee wrote: post #204
Brian_K_White wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me 11 minutes from now: "why did you use venv? They replaced that 11 minutes ago with ..."

No. If you’re not an experienced python programmer then I can see that your comment might seem like a witty contribution. But I was actually providing good advice.

If you're not an experienced /anything/ then I can see how that comment might have seemed like a personal attack, but I was actually only providing an observation, from someone who's been around longer than "11 minutes", about python and the rate at which it and other similar entire systems and their library of best practices changes, dickface.

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

#289

Post by mikemcquaid »

fragmede wrote: post #208
johnboiles wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I love homebrew. I just set up my new M1 Max machine and half of the setup work was just brew commands to install cli stuff and casks <3. It's such a joy to not need to go to a bazillion websites to download dmgs

did brew leaves from your old machine not hey you a transferrable list of packages?

‘brew bundle dump’ does an even nicer job of this. Check it out!

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

#290

Post by mikemcquaid »

kristjansson wrote: post #200
fredsted wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An apt-style 'hey here's what you going to do, confirm/deny' would be _great_ in homebrew

Not sure how to add that prompt by default without breaking existing scripts. Making it non-default seems like it wouldn’t help (given comments here).
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