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Homebrew 3.0

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#191

Post by sirn »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #79
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?

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…

Unfortunately, Nixpkg doesn't check buildability on Darwin when merging PRs, so things can break quite often on the nixpkgs-unstable channel (compared to nixpkgs-unstable on Linux). It's not hard to rollback, though, but it does makes me never want to ever run `nix-channel --update`.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#192

Post by dmitriid »

game_the0ry wrote: post #141
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.

I am cool with constructive criticism, but you do realize brew is free, right? If you are not happy with open source, you have a couple of options: - build your own brew - brew is open source, so you can make contributions to improve - pay for something like brew (though probably not an option for brew) Have you done any of the above before complaining? I am guessing - no. Otherwise, say "thank you" and move on, my f…

Being free doesn't absolve it of criticism.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#193

Post by smazga »

throw0101a wrote: post #136
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.

Besides the already-mentioned MacPorts, NetBSD's pkgsrc is multi-platform, including macOS (AFAICT): * https://www.pkgsrc.org/

Yeah, it works on macOS and is actually very nice, but its package catalog is not quite as comprehensive and OS upgrades are a huge headache. In other words, a solid alternative with a different set of issues.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#195

Post by Hamuko »

paultopia wrote: post #155
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.

Yes. I'm really torn about brew. On the one hand, I hate to crap on the work that the maintainers have done, and it's clearly the best thing out there for macos. On the other hand, it's a terrible dictatorial piece of software that wants to command precisely how you use your computer; those same maintainers are actively hostile to users, as evidenced by the endless stream of nasty responses to issues, arbitrary chang…

>it's a terrible dictatorial piece of software that wants to command precisely how you use your computer

I've also seen examples of where Homebrew is basically dictating on how to release your software as well. There was that one case where they decided to delete the formula for mpv since mpv didn't have a recent enough of a tagged release.

https://github.com/danielbair/homebrew-core/commit/b18f104f1...

There was also an instance with mpv where Homebrew devs got pissy about mpv not supporting Lua 5.3 and mpv devs got angry at Homebrew devs for asking to break existing user scripts to appease one package manager.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#196

Post by wejick »

toyg wrote: post #14
yulaow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think homebrew has more user than say apt or pacman. Maybe there are a bit more people running osx than linux, but much of them are not devs or "power users" and never run homebrew.

Apt I can agree, it's still the gold standard of package manager and powers the most popular distributions out there in bajillion cloud instances. Pacman, erm what? Arc is a niche of a niche. I'd bet Alpine's package manager sees more action than that - let alone yum/rpm.

I have friends working on debian based distro, following their discussions on a lot of dpkg packaging intricacies is crazy. However that also means it's mature piece of software that handle many cases under the sky of software packaging and distribution.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#197

Post by bargsteen »

ilikepi wrote: post #179
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.

For some time now, in the default configuration, `brew upgrade` is run automatically any time you run `brew install`. You have to set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE to disable this behavior. EDIT: whoops, that was incorrect. It's actually `brew update` that is run automatically, which updates Homebrew itself plus all of its formulae. However, I think often the effect can't be similar. If formulae are updated, and the new pa…

Yes, figuring this out I created an alias a few months ago. #LifeImproved :D

Add this to your .zshrc or equivalent (f for fast):

alias brewf="HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew"

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#198

Post by Wowfunhappy »

nrclark wrote: post #111
lucideer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> found it a bit cumbersome with the “no sudo” requirement This is one of the few features I do love about Homebrew. Does MacPorts have a "no sudo" mode or does it just let all packages run rampant on your system?

I'm not sure about unprivileged installs, but MacPorts is very good about sticking to /opt/local. It doesn't ever place anything (including config files) outside of /opt/local. So you get pretty good assurance that it won't trash your system too badly.

And, they actually enforce this with a specially provisioned MacPorts user. So although it requires sudo, MacPorts installs don’t actually run as root.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#200

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

w0m wrote: post #142
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.

Personally; only issue i tend to have is that when I install X, it breaks Y forcing reinstallation of ~everything. What should be a small install ends up taking 30m of cleanup. Entirely likely it's user error on my part; but also problem I haven't really had with other 'nix package managers.

Which isn't funny when Y is Postgres and your database is no longer readable post-upgrade. Happened to me.
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