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Homebrew 3.0

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#181

Post by cmehdy »

quesera wrote: post #166
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either. They both work well (we can and do quibble about the internal mechanics of each), and appeal to different groups of people. My theory is that Homebrew was announced at exactly the right time in the MacOS adoption curve. A huge number of new users arrived with no existing knowledge of MacPorts or Fink. Most of them didn't know they needed a package manager…

For some users I would argue brew was indeed better - I can't judge for the technical level, but definitely so for the UX and troubleshooting.

I might have liked MacPorts with my current experience, but when I first needed to install CLIs and tools I did not have extensive knowledge of shells and paths and such, and MacPorts felt significantly less "integrated" especially when something would fail (as opposed to brew occasionally just asking if you want to overwrite symlinks essentially).

I'll never know if MacPorts was better once you're past the initial hurdles since I'm so used to brew these days, and I believe that sort of experience is probably not isolated. Given the propensity for Mac users to want something that just kinda works and gets details out of the way, I can see why brew succeeded.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#182

Post by selfsimilar »

quesera wrote: post #166
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either. They both work well (we can and do quibble about the internal mechanics of each), and appeal to different groups of people. My theory is that Homebrew was announced at exactly the right time in the MacOS adoption curve. A huge number of new users arrived with no existing knowledge of MacPorts or Fink. Most of them didn't know they needed a package manager…

About 11 years ago I moved over to then OS X and Homebrew was very new compared to MacPorts at the time. I started with the more established MacPorts, but quickly became frustrated with how many broken and outdated packages were hosted on MacPorts. So I moved over to Homebrew and haven't looked back.

This is not to say that Homebrew is perfect; there's lots of big and little things I'd change. But I'd argue that at least at the inflection point of its introduction, Homebrew definitely solved a problem I was having with its competition. Timing helped for sure, but in my experience it won on technical merits.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#183

Post by loeg »

salzig wrote: post #94
cwxm wrote: 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.

Without this, the developer experience on Apple would be way worse, if not just plain shit.

I agree with the general sentiment, but there are other, similar tools that also function fine as duct-tape over the missing pieces in MacOS (i.e., MacPorts).

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#184

Post by juandazapata »

regulation_d wrote: post #139
qntty wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I installed awscli and somehow emacs ended up installed in my system.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#185

Post by cmehdy »

loriverkutya wrote: post #150
peteretep wrote: post #113

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.

When I get angry about brew sucks I always remind myself there is npm.

When I get angry about npm, I remind myself there is gradle.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#186

Post by yardie »

flemhans wrote: post #129
yardie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macports? They’ve been around even longer than brew. But they were always a bit too Linuxy for most Mac users.

I always thought that brew was the "Linuxy" one and Macports was FreeBSD Ports for the Mac.

Well I don't mean Linuxy in the architecture sense but Linuxy in the preparation and final stage installation sense. Like Homebrew does not need elevated privileges to work and actively discourages it. MacPorts, when something breaks, is a rabbit hole of elevated commands to bring it back to functional.

Of course this is my opinion as I had Macports and Homebrew installed on my MBP 2012. I've swapped to a newer MBP and I only have HB installed. Since most packages are on HB I no longer need to have both installed.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#187

Post by loeg »

shagie wrote: post #128
mojuba wrote: 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?

MacPorts and Homebrew have a different philosophy of software installation. MacPorts wants to have its own thing over in /opt where it has its own toolchain independent from the system tool chain. This means that all users on the system share the same MacPorts software. This has an additional impact that it means that it requires privilege to install software there. Homebrew, on the other hand, uses the system toolch…

> This means that all users on the system share the same MacPorts software. This has an additional impact that it means that it requires privilege to install software there.

> Homebrew, on the other hand, uses the system toolchain and tries to avoid using root.

What? Homebrew wants you to change ownership of /usr/local to your individual user and refuses to run without doing so. How is that any different as far "as all users on the system share the same software?"

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#188

Post by saurik »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #134
peteretep wrote: post #113

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.

"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.

Homebrew "took over" because of a combination of web 2.0 marketing that prematurely shat on its competitors while claiming it was the "modern and beautiful approach" while ignoring hard-learned lessons about the extents to which Apple doesn't care about breaking things and removing programs or libraries from their base system--the Homebrew people were really pissy about "MacPorts insists on installing its own version of X... I already have X!" and would claim "Apple used to chance stuff back six years ago, but they surely stopped by now" and then slowly had to relearn this lesson over time--or supporting binary packages (which both fink and MacPorts had great support for, but the Homebrew people insisted on ignoring that as part of the "I shouldn't have to recompile the world to install software", which was nonsensical) or even basic security mandates (some of which they still haven't fixed, such as the insecure way they handle /usr/local). It was honestly ridiculous, and they only really got to a place of being "better" only by eventually becoming more like the things they insisted were dumb and by capturing all of the new blood contributors mostly due to messaging/marketing (and so eventually ending up in a state where new software now ends up being brought to brew by default). If anything, the only thing I can think of where Homebrew even slightly offered an "advantage" worthy of arguing "this is why they won" is by choosing to dump their stuff in /usr/local instead of making a new root (such as Fink's /sw or Nix's /nix) or carefully next organizing it under /opt (such as was done by MacPorts), which did in fact mean that more software tended to just detect automatically stuff (as some things do their own searches instead of using configured environment variable search paths).

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#189

Post by thaeli »

volta83 wrote: post #170
quesera wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either. They both work well (we can and do quibble about the internal mechanics of each), and appeal to different groups of people. My theory is that Homebrew was announced at exactly the right time in the MacOS adoption curve. A huge number of new users arrived with no existing knowledge of MacPorts or Fink. Most of them didn't know they needed a package manager…

I used MacPorts before hombrew. Homebrew "just worked", MacPorts sucked. Maybe I was too dumb to use MacPorts, but all other MacPort used I knew back then all moved to homebrew very quickly.

This, so much this. I tried to use MacPorts. It was pulling teeth every time. Brew was a It Just Works breath of fresh air.

I agree that it's a very opinionated tool, and note that those opinions fit in well with the Mac ecosystem. They aren't as good a fit for Linux or Windows.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#190

Post by tclancy »

volta83 wrote: post #170
quesera wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either. They both work well (we can and do quibble about the internal mechanics of each), and appeal to different groups of people. My theory is that Homebrew was announced at exactly the right time in the MacOS adoption curve. A huge number of new users arrived with no existing knowledge of MacPorts or Fink. Most of them didn't know they needed a package manager…

I used MacPorts before hombrew. Homebrew "just worked", MacPorts sucked. Maybe I was too dumb to use MacPorts, but all other MacPort used I knew back then all moved to homebrew very quickly.

Same. I wrestled with it and Fink for a while. Maybe things have gotten a lot better elsewhere and I have Stockholm Syndrome, but so far so good.
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