Live data from Hacker News

Homebrew 1.1.0

brew.sh

141–150 of 216 posts

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#141
post #64

I have very mixed feelings about homebrew. When it works, it is awesome, but when it doesn't it can be a serious nightmare. In particular, homebrew refuses to run under sudo. Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). I have mostly stopped using it for this reason. I understand that running a program that runs third-party scripts under sudo…

I have the same concerns and have been using Nix for my Mac package manager [1] instead. Functionally it's far better, though with far fewer packages available currently. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772686

I've been meaning to try out Nix for probably years. I work in vfx and large facilities have particular needs that most packaging systems don't support, but there's a huge about of investment that can be leveraged (dependency resolution, caching).

I did a fresh install of macOS with Sierra and decided to use Nix instead of Homebrew this time around. So far I've only started reading through the docs and only have a few things installed; git, vim, tmux. What are your thoughts about using it as a Homebrew alternative?

I've been using Homebrew for years and have been a huge fan so far. I often look at formulas when trying to build things from scratch on Linux.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#142
I don't know if I can trust homebrew, I hear their implementation of reversing binary trees is weak.

On the other hand it's been pretty darn good for me.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cool idea! How does one go about doing this though? Is there a flag to output a text file with the names of installed versioned packages?

The officially supported thing is: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle See my Brewfile in my dotfiles for how I use it to install my stuff: https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/dotfiles/blob/master/Brewfile If you want to go a step further there's also Strap which will bootstrap your macOS system with some sensible defaults and install Homebrew, your dotfiles and your Brewfile: https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap…

This is utterly brilliant! Thank you.

I've been looking like this for quite a while. I'm still looking through it all, but I don't suppose you have a solution for setting System Preferences, particularly Trackpad settings and remapping the Caps Lock key to Ctrl?

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#144
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much the reason why MacPorts requires sudo, so it can drop to a less-privileged "macports" user for builds, without putting your own user account at risk.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I find MacPorts to be superior to Homebrew in every way, from writing the ports themselves, to installing them and managing them. I used to use Homebrew some time ago, but when I got my Mac Mini, I decided to forgo it in favor of MacPorts and Pkgsrc (which Joyent also provides binaries of for OSX). Whatever MacPorts doesn't have (a rare occurrence), Pkgsrc tends to have it. If not,…

As a side note and in fact late to the party, but MacPorts very recently also migrated to Git and GitHub: https://github.com/macports/

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#146
post #49

Disabling sha1 does not seem like a good decision. There are still enough upstream software projects that only publish their checksums as sha1 or even only md5. Keeping the original checksum allows quick comparison that a Formula is meant to use the same tarballs that were published by upstream. The problems of algorithms such as sha1 or md5 can be remedied by an additional strong checksum in the Formula. Checksum ca…

Homebrew does, in fact, always use its own strong additional checksum (sha256) in the individual Formulae for all downloaded resources.

There is nothing wrong with calculating your own additional checksum, but as far as I can see, sha256 is now the only supported checksum type in Homebrew at all.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#147
post #34

I'm going to ditto the positive comments. Kudos to the maintainers - not just for the package itself but for growing it. They successfully went from a hacky page with some scripts, to a big giant repository, to multiple repos, to a fully fledged mature best-practices package manager for macOS with all the bells and whistles. The sign of a great project isn't just that it does one thing well, but that it grows with th…

Thanks for the kind words. You'd be surprised how motivating they are. <3

I started writing a package manager example app, and I quickly learned how much work goes into creating a good one. Ever since I have been grateful for any work others put into working on package management!

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#149
Of all package managers I use, homebrew is without a doubt the most satisfying. It tracks updates closely and has always had any package I was looking for, yet I don't remember the last time I ran into an error.

(I'm sure all three happen, but if I can't find them with close to 200 packages installed, they must be doing something right)

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#150

I don't know if I can trust homebrew, I hear their implementation of reversing binary trees is weak. On the other hand it's been pretty darn good for me.

That made me laugh! I hope everyone gets the joke. Homebrew is great. :)
Post reply on HN