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Homebrew 3.0

brew.sh

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#201

Post by talentedcoin »

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that Homebrew forced people use Ruby to write formulas (ie packages), whereas MacPorts forced people to use Tcl. This one decision, plus hosting formulas on Github, was a major contributor to their present success.

As much as I sympathize (deeply) with all the criticism of Homebrew here on this thread -- I used to use MacPorts religiously and love it -- I don't think Homebrew took the field purely through sneaky marketing or n00b decisions alone. They leveraged the momentum of a lot of new devs coming to OS X and provided an easier path for people wanting to help out.

I hate to say it, but if this was a race (?), Homebrew won. Thankfully we all still have the choice to use MacPorts if we want, but there's no point in being mean about Homebrew at this point either.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#202

Post by quesera »

cmehdy wrote: post #181
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…

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…

You're probably right about Homebrew feeling more comfortable for new users.

Opinions on Homebrew may diverge with the answers to "How would you prefer to install? a) curl pipe to shell, or b) Download a DMG, double-click to install, and update your PATH." :)

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#203

Post by [deleted] »

martpie wrote: post #131
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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#204

Post by jeremycw »

peteretep wrote: post #171
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.

I ran `brew install graphviz` today and caught it running an upgrade of zeromq

I ran `brew install graphiz` a week ago and got a new major postgres version.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#205

Post by dylan604 »

Gelob wrote: post #133
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.

+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.

so, you don't do a 'yum update' before installing software on your system (or 'apt-get update' or whatever)? Are you also the type of person that refuses to update system software because "it takes too long, and I'm too busy"?

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#206

Post by overgard »

martpie wrote: post #131
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.

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?

Time?

> 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.

This is such an unhealthy attitude. Just because something is free doesn't make it above criticism. Also doesn't mean that the maintainers don't benefit from their projects even if there isn't direct compensation (more career opportunities, visibility, etc.) This idea that we need to walk on eggshells around anyone that does any volunteer work is kinda absurd.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#207

Post by [deleted] »

peteretep wrote: post #113
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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#208

Post by jperkin »

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/

macOS users may want to use my binary package repository, updated every few days from pkgsrc trunk:

https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#209

Post by thomaslkjeldsen »

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…

The decisions to enable auto update, the removal of `--with-foo` options, breaking the `brew list` command and the removal of `depends_on :x11` were all mistakes, as I see it. I have read loads of issues and pull requests to understand the reasoning but have yet to find arguments that I think justifies those breaking changes.

I get it, it's all made by volunteers, but I wish there was a package manager for macOS that was focused on professional users.

I wonder if the decision process in Homebrew has relied perhaps too much on analytics data leading to the dismissal/ignorance of features used primarily by users who have disabled analytics via the HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS environment flag.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#210

Post by prpl »

peteretep wrote: post #113
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.

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.

It might not cover everything, but it also has a superset of other things more - conda + conda-forge (with mamba too for better performance)

The had also apple silicon support for many things more than a month ago.

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