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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?

#301

Post by pxc »

handrous wrote: post #300
pxc wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never forgiven RPM-based distros for all the time I lost to RPM hell over the years, and for going so long with worse CLI tools than apt. apt and dpkg are way behind dnf and rpm these days, both in terms of the structure of packages and the interfaces of the high-level CLI tools What do you like best about Homebrew?

> What do you like best about Homebrew? Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces, which is part of why it's never, in nearly a decade, broken my system the way any others have. Homebrew's never made my system unbootable. Homebrew's never broken my GUI. Homebrew's never fucked up some driver that had been working totally fine. In another sense, that's tot…

> Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces[.] [...] [T]hat's totally fair if you consider the platform as a whole. It's really hard for Linux overall to separate user packages from system packages, mostly because it's all mixed up together in a way that it's not on MacOS or Windows—but a distro could take that approach, if they wanted.

Yeah, this is a valid insight! It's essentially the approach that contemporary free BSDs take, and it's a direction popular distros are gradually trying to move in by shifting end-user applications to containerized package managers like Flatpak, AppImage, and Snappy. Fedora Silverblue is an example of an extreme case, where the base system is read-only.

> #1: Separation of a very complete and capable base GUI OS […]

I suppose the BSDs fall down here, since their base system doesn't include a GUI.

> Every other package manager I've used for any serious length of time, I've repeatedly seen get in weird states that required substantial fiddling before I could use them for anything again, after what should have been boring and normal usage.

I've only really seen this happen when using distro package managers to perform several years worth of release upgrades or convert between distributions.

I like the uniformity of Linux's package management tools (i.e., the ability to use the same tools to manage OS components as end-user software), but I can see how using one thing for OS components, especially if it's reliable and mostly hands-off, but then using something else for end-user software can be appealing.

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

#302

Post by handrous »

pxc wrote: post #301
handrous wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you like best about Homebrew? Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces, which is part of why it's never, in nearly a decade, broken my system the way any others have. Homebrew's never made my system unbootable. Homebrew's never broken my GUI. Homebrew's never fucked up some driver that had been working totally fine. In another sense, that's tot…

> Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces[.] [...] [T]hat's totally fair if you consider the platform as a whole. It's really hard for Linux overall to separate user packages from system packages, mostly because it's all mixed up together in a way that it's not on MacOS or Windows—but a distro could take that approach, if they wanted. Yeah, this is a va…

Yeah, I think these days I'd find FreeBSD a better fit than Linux. I'm... increasingly kinda over Linux. Red Hat's continuing political success in pushing projects it (more or less) steers toward de facto standard status, while having (in my opinion) god-awful taste in project architecture and goals, has the whole ecosystem going a direction I don't like.

Nonetheless, it'd be nice to have the GUI included in the "this doesn't break" part of the OS. It'd be pretty unlikely that Homebrew could screw up an entire day for me, because the scope of things it's likely to even be able to mess up is limited. A package upgrade breaks X or Wayland, though? Ugh, there goes the day. Increasingly, I think stronger guarantees that the GUI layer does not break, or become unstable (god, I've seen so many X crashes in my life) except under very unusual circumstances, would be table-stakes in my switching full time to another workstation OS. Which leaves me options of... MacOS or Windows. Win10/11's telemetry and adware crap is unacceptable, and I like unixy tools, so that leaves me one option. :-(

Then again, ZFS with snapshotting can paper over a lot of packaging & system-update problems, which is part of why I'm thinking there may be a lot more FreeBSD in my future (yeah, yeah, I know, Linux has it too, but I've developed—like scar tissue—a healthy mistrust of Linux distros' ability to deal with "non-standard" file systems, when it comes to the root filesystem)

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

#304

Post by jd3 »

mdaniel wrote: post #244
jd3 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syst…

yeah, i definitely think your point stands

the only place i know of where you can (easily) report an issue with a specific package is https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc/issues

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

#305

Post by KolenCh »

My current solutions mainly relies on homebrew + Macports + conda.

Macports primarily for system level dep. use this whenever packages available.

Fall back to homebrew when not available on Macports. This includes brew cask which is unique.

This dual setup may requires you to carefully separating the 2 when installing and updating. I do this by installing brew in custom location (not /use/local) which is now the default on ARM. Also some shell functions that selectively control the environment (essentially I use an environment that only sees port to update port, vice versa.)

Lastly, conda for dev environments, mostly for Python stack. But it is also useful for other stuffs (conda is a cross platform package manager and in this sense it is similar to brew which also support Linux.) Obviously selections is not as broad comparing to brew.

On computing facilities, I used to use linuxbrew to install some “system” dependencies that’s missing, including zsh, mosh, tmux, tree, etc. But obviously I cannot install in the recommended path by brew, which means compiles from source. And it is not robust (and they also say this is not a supported pattern.) I now use conda for this and is very robust (conda uses a hack to install precompiled binaries to arbitrary prefix.)

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

#306

Post by FranksTV »

bin_bash wrote: post #216
dcchambers wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mike - just wanted to say thanks for all you (and the other Homebrew volunteers) do! My mac dev experience is 100x better with Homebrew - it's literally the first thing I install when I get a new machine. Perhaps in situations like this Homebrew could alert the user "Hey, this package hasn't been updated in a while and 40 other packages depend on it so this is going to take a while. Press enter to confirm or cancel a…

It's not as simple as you think: consider headless setups.

Generally programs can figure out whether they should run interactively or not.

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

#307

Post by physicsguy »

smoldesu wrote: post #179
physicsguy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For me it's just my personal one I've had for a few years, I couldn't really afford to spend more when I bought it as I was a student. I think the new MBPs start at 512gb now

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

#308

Post by taylodl »

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_…

For the record I love Homebrew. I even use Homebrew to install regular applications whenever possible because I love how easy it is to update them. I appreciate the complexities of dependency management and yes, it sucked a bit when I installed postgresql. That isn't a problem with Homebrew though, that's just the nature of the beast.

Anyway, I just wanted to say you guys are doing a great job!

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

#309

Post by DemocracyFTW »

mdaniel wrote: post #40
yakubin wrote: post #30

A while ago there was a post on HN about pkgsrc [1][2][3], which works on Mac, among other platforms. I haven't tried it, but it may be worth a shot. [1]: https://rubenerd.com/using-netbsds-pkgsrc-everywhere-i-can/ > [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293108 > [3]: http://www.pkgsrc.org/ >

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

mailing list, IRC, and CVS, that is...

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

#310

Post by DemocracyFTW »

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.

Docker has a considerable barrier to entry if you've never used it before. Flatpack has horrible download sizes and result in non-standard invocation command lines.
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