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Homebrew 3.0

brew.sh

131–140 of 516 posts

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#131
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.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

The usual non-productive rant.

What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project?

"It sucks" doesn't help anyone understand your frustrations and does not serve the message you're trying to share (let this one be valid or not).

Also, as everything that is open-source/free: if you hate it, don't use it, that's it. And let the people who appreciate it be productive and build awesome tools with it.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#132
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?

I find that MacPorts is a better citizen of my laptop, but the mindshare of homebrew means that brew will have both more packages and more up to date packages. And getting the tools team at work to vend both brew and macports seems malicious so I just suck it up there.

I don’t use homebrew (for many of the reasons found in the comments here and more) but this is why I do visit their repo[1] for a “formula” whenever I need something macports or pkgsrc can’t supply me.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul...

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#133
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.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

+1. i like it but yes if i dont use it everyday and 2 weeks later go to brew install something, omg it has some gigantic update to do before i can brew install anything.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#134
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.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

"Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better."

MacPorts and fink existed before homebrew took over, and they weren't better. That's why homebrew took over.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#135
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw you can use the Nix package manager ( https://nixos.org/ ) on OS X to accomplish those same things. Lots of discussion about that the past few years: https://google.com/?q=nix+on+mac+os+x Nix has more packages than MacPorts - 60k vs 37.6k - though that's not necessarily a guarantee the ones you need are there. And like MacPorts it doesn't do weird, non-Unix-y ownership changes of system directories like Homebrew…

How is that better than a pm specifically designed for Mac?

Are you talking about Homerew or MacPorts?

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#136
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.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

Besides the already-mentioned MacPorts, NetBSD's pkgsrc is multi-platform, including macOS (AFAICT):

* https://www.pkgsrc.org/

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the case of Swift, they actually took this advice to heart - and hired Max to help them do it. That said, it remains disappointing to me that unless you're producing content with Apple's hardware or building apps for the Stores, they don't really do much to help you. For example, if you're writing client or server-side web code, they will acknowledge your existence, and are more than willing to sell you a Mac, but…

[deleted]

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

The usual non-productive rant. What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project? "It sucks" doesn't help anyone understand your frustrations and does not serve the message you're trying to share (let this one be valid or not). Also, as everything that is open-source/free: if you hate it, don't use it, that's it. And let the people who app…

> What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project?

I think ~everything he stated is generally assumed true. I use Brew installed software every single day, and appreciate it. That doesn't put it above criticism though.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#139
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrarian view here: brew fucking sucks. It’s the worst package manager I’ve used for doing random unwanted updates at odd times. Someone else would have filled the void if homebrew hadn’t shown up, and it would hopefully have been better. I hate that brew is good enough that it’s got some kind of local maximum such that there’s no replacement forthcoming. There, I said it.

What do you mean by random unwanted updates? As far as I know, the only way to update is by running brew upgrade.

one time i ran “brew upgrade ffmpeg” which somehow forced a major version bump of postgres.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#140
post #114
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way?

Dependency management in Homebrew is nothing short of primitive or broken...

Not to mention that the recommended way of installing certain packages changes seemingly randomly sometimes. Python, PHP, OpenJDK are ones that I've specifically had issues with. It starts with finding some random blog post on Google that differs from every other blog post on Google about how to accomplish the install. Then you spend a bit looking for other references to see if the one you're following is the new way or the old way that won't work right anymore.

I also very rarely update my Homebrew packages because there is no telling what will break half the time due to this.

And the fact that simply installing a package force updates every other package by default! I needed a single tiny utility while on a screen share recently, I `brew install` it. 15 minutes later Brew was still figuring the world out and it ended up being faster to just find the utility on Github and download it manually to use while letting Brew do its thing in the background. Still no idea if it ever ended up installing...

Don't get me wrong, I still think brew has been handy for me over the years. But I breathe a sigh of relief whenever I `apt-get` something on a Debian box and it behaves in a sane manner.

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