191–200 of 380 posts
Hi Mike, I’m @bfontaine on GitHub (I helped maintain Homebrew in ~2014-2016). I’m always impressed at your longevity as a maintainer; it’s been like what, 16+ years you’ve been maintaining Homebrew and you’re still here, still shipping new features! Thank you for everything!
17 in September. Thanks for all your great work at the time! Hope you’re well <3
Homebrew is a non-profit project run entirely by volunteers, not employees. We need your funds to pay for software, hardware and hosting around continuous integration and future improvements to the project. Every donation will be spent on making Homebrew better for our users. Please consider a regular donation through GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective and Patreon. I donate to a lot of open source projects that I benefi…
Is it true that contributors to homebrew need to know how to invert a binary tree?
Back in the day, pkgsrc was a thing (cross-platform; originally from NetBSD). Source based package distribution, it explicitly allowed for unprivileged installation to a prefix of your choice. I became very familiar with it as an ordinary Solaris user 20 years ago.
I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are: - Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained, - Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing, - Better UX. Obviously I…
I was interested in Nix because it could automate setup and configuration of macOS features. But all it does is usually run defaults or some intermediatary. In the end I stuck with brew and wrote an idempotent setupmac() function in my bash_profile (I use bash 5) with the aid of chatgpt since it knows all the cool defaults commands, and it’s pretty much solved setting up a new account or mac (alongside a Brewfile I m…
Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)
Of course, I've also made a concerted effort over the years to migrate everything to uv for Python, pnpm for nodejs, etc. so maybe it's not an issue for me anymore?
Hi Mike, I’m @bfontaine on GitHub (I helped maintain Homebrew in ~2014-2016). I’m always impressed at your longevity as a maintainer; it’s been like what, 16+ years you’ve been maintaining Homebrew and you’re still here, still shipping new features! Thank you for everything!
Homebrew is so good that I use it on Linux whenever possible. Most Linux package managers cannot separate user-installed packages from system packages. This makes cleaning up your workstation nearly impossible and a pain in the ass, since you can't tell what should be removed, or more importantly, what can be removed. Also, most native package managers update much slower than Homebrew, meaning you often only get outd…
The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple! I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.
At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support). If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mise installs itself as a static binary actually (but it's of course packaged in many registries), and while there are some third party registries it delegates to for some packages (aqua, asfd), most stuff I have installed is either built-in, or from PyPI, npm or GitHub, i.e. directly published by the upstream maintainers. More info: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/backends/
You'll see that mise recommends installing itself exclusively through package registries: https://mise.jdx.dev/installing-mise.html pypi, npm, and even github (through releases) are registries. curl | sh is an anti-pattern. It passes no security check.