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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?

#51

Post by yesenadam »

da39a3ee wrote: post #29
BruceEel wrote: post #13

My experience is that both (Macports, Homebrew) are comically unreliable and frustrating to use. That said, with my insistence to install under $HOME, Macports seems to work slightly better. But truly, I got the best results from downloading and compiling every single flipping dependency myself.

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've never had a problem with Macports and am wondering exactly the same thing. "Comically unreliable"?!

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

#52

Post by yakkers »

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 want to quickly install something or run a package search, has entirely opt-in telemetry through installing a package (mpstats) and still lets me customise packages (through the variants system, which is more powerful than the with --with-feature system Homebrew seems to have abandoned).

The only pain point I've found is upgrading to new macOS releases, though I've often found just reinstalling MacPorts itself will get me going again in a pinch without having to take inventory of my installed ports and reinstall everything from scratch.

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

#53

Post by mdaniel »

alnja8a wrote: post #47
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

why does the protocol by which bugs and problems get tracked matter, its not like you dont have an email address already... the bug reporting tool is mentioned on the packages page but not the most clear. http://www.pkgsrc.org/#index2h1

I did qualify "for me," indicating that system is not the way that I want to interact with a project

The answer to your question is that searching years of email threads is not the same UX as navigating to a dedicated page for managing the lifecycle of a (bug|feature) that tracks when I can expect a new, or working, version of -- in this case awscli-v2 -- to show up, or (if reasonable) that I can indicate to others that I'm willing to take responsibility for doing the work to package it, in order to avoid duplicated effort

Plus, again for me, I don't need more email traffic in my life

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

#54

Post by civilized »

glintik wrote: post #17

I 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

And since this technique relies on setting an environment variable, you can of course put it in your .bashrc/.zshrc, restart your Terminal, and you'll never have to remember it again:

  export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

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

#55

Post by encryptluks2 »

zzbzq wrote: post #37
Apreche wrote: post #12

The fact that homebrew is awful is one of the huge reasons I don’t use MacOS for development like all my co-workers. Instead I use Windows with WSL because the company won’t allow me a Linux laptop. If I had to use a Mac my solutions would be to alway use Docker, a virtual machine, or a remote dev environment of some kind.

Funny, I use Windows with WSL and the first thing I do when I set up a new WSL instance is get homebrew (linuxbrew) and install everything else through that if available. apt/dpkg and any other package manager that scatters files all over the filesystem is just an absolute disaster that--if you do a lot of R&D tinkering--eventually renders a computer unusable after a few years. That's what happened to my first WSL in…

IMO this is so cringe and far from the truth. If you want a slow non-standard package manager they litters your computer and breaks things then that is Homebrew. If you want standardized installs then use apt/pacman/APK and just don't install a lot of user packages not in default repos.

Homebrew is one of the slowest package managers I've ever used.

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

#57

Post by kortex »

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.

I can't recommend pyenv and pipx enough. I use brew to install pyenv and pipx, and there ends my interaction with brew and python.

Pyenv builds all of my python versions. Pipx installs cli tools in their own env.

Precommit is also great for much more than just pre-commit hooks. It can install tools used for hooks in their own cache, no need to manage venvs yourself.

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

#59

Post by geraneum »

vr46 wrote: post #42
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 find Mike McQuaid pretty reasonable and forthright whenever I have ever messaged him. Also, he is hardly responsible for every formula out there. For anyone who remembers the year 2000 and having to compile everything from scratch, Homebrew is brilliant - but there are complexities and quirks. For Python I’d go with pyenv. Postgres - well, watch your step and maybe use Docker instead.

For PostgreSQL on macOS I use and suggest https://postgresapp.com/ which is free and able to manage multiple Postgres major versions. It's also self-contained in a folder in /Applications. Also, version 14 of Postgres in the app has m1 native support.

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

#60

Post by civilized »

A lot of the usual "it's bad" "it's not bad for me" discourse in these threads. Could people raise the bar a bit and talk about specific problems they have had with homebrew - other than the auto-update, which we've already noted can be changed by setting HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1? Thanks.
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