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Homebrew 3.0

brew.sh

31–40 of 516 posts

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#32
post #21

Been a MacPorts user for years and I know nothing about Homebrew. To those who tried both: should a software engineer switch to Homebrew? MacPorts has its own way of dealing with dev tools and framework versioning. E.g. you can have multiple versions of complex products like PHP or MySQL at once. You can even have a GCC package for a specific target arch as a separate ports package. Does Homebrew allow these things?

Yes

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#34
Brew is great. I’ve switched to using Nix as much as I could but most “Apps” aren’t supported yet where `brew install —cask` has it right away.

Always nice to know Brew will always have the latest version around. The only problem with that ends up being that if you use brew for development dependencies like Node or Python you can’t manage multiple versions. Nix being the most powerful in this area.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#35
post #3

I can’t even begin to imagine how much value Max Howell (creator of Homebrew) has added to the world. It’s the recommended package manager at every place I’ve worked at and saves so much headache. I use Linux at home and package managers like AUR are great, but macOS is where the users are.

It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. This intrepid band of volunteers are adding huge value to one of the largest corporations on earth. I appreciate the DIY effort of anyone who volunteers, though I see the donate tab on their website and sigh a little.

> It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash.

I can understand them not wanting to do it themselves. I don't think they want to take on the responsibility for maintaining all those packages (for legal reasons or otherwise). Because it's a "not officially Apple" thing, Homebrew can probably get away with a "no warranty" sticker that an official Apple project couldn't.

What Apple should do, however, is ship a DUMP TRUCK OF MONEY to every Homebrew maintainer on a regular basis. That project is crucial to basically every Apple developer, and it massively enriches macOS as a general purpose development platform. Apple would be fools to not support it financially.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#36
post #3

I can’t even begin to imagine how much value Max Howell (creator of Homebrew) has added to the world. It’s the recommended package manager at every place I’ve worked at and saves so much headache. I use Linux at home and package managers like AUR are great, but macOS is where the users are.

It’s Weird that Apple doesn’t do this themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a cash. And it’s important for devs to have up to date tooling. This intrepid band of volunteers are adding huge value to one of the largest corporations on earth. I appreciate the DIY effort of anyone who volunteers, though I see the donate tab on their website and sigh a little.

I don't think it's weird. Actually I think it's important to keep this as a community effort, in the spirit of FOSS. From developers, to developers, you know. Surely it would be nice for the maintainers if Apple could throw in some cash, though :)

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#37
post #21

Been a MacPorts user for years and I know nothing about Homebrew. To those who tried both: should a software engineer switch to Homebrew? MacPorts has its own way of dealing with dev tools and framework versioning. E.g. you can have multiple versions of complex products like PHP or MySQL at once. You can even have a GCC package for a specific target arch as a separate ports package. Does Homebrew allow these things?

Here’s a blog post from April 2019 on package managers on macOS. [1] The author, saagarjha (who also comments here regularly), switched from homebrew to MacPorts. A more current update to this post would probably be more helpful.

In my limited experience, I’ve tried homebrew a few times, but found it a bit cumbersome with the “no sudo” requirement.

[1]: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2019/04/26/thoughts-on-macos-pack...

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#38
This is great! Does anyone happen to know how to upgrade from the experimental Apple Silicon version (installed to an alternate prefix /opt/homebrew) that was released late last year?

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#39
I'm trying to avoid installing Rosetta 2. Anyone know if there's a way to configure Homebrew to never install an x86_64 binary and throw an error if I ask it to install a formula which isn't native on AArch64?

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#40
post #4

/me searches changelog for "`brew update` now runs asynchronously and doesn't block the process to install a 3 year-old package." Dismayed, I do not find it. Asynchronous formula updates would IMO save the most Mac man-years of almost any macOS tool.

I feel like it would be a /tremendous/ amount of work to install packages -- which often have dependencies -- asynchronously.

When is this really a problem, anyway? You should probably not have something like 'brew update' scheduled to run periodically, as then a broken package could break something unexpectedly. It should really only be run when you're ready to check for broken things, which means you can also schedule it to run when you can deal with waiting for the process to complete.

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