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Homebrew 3.0

brew.sh

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#221

Post by personjerry »

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…

> dictatorial piece of software

Isn't that generally the point, for Apple consumers? At HN we have a skewed sample but I imagine for a lot of users (myself included), having an easy solution with configurations set for you is exactly what they want.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#222

Post by FemmeAndroid »

overgard wrote: post #206
martpie wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 does…

> Just because something is free doesn’t make it above criticism.

What was being responded to wasn’t criticism. It was whining without any substance.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#223

Post by freedomben »

I don't see Linux mentioned at all.

I'm not complaining, but as a Linux user who uses dnf/yum for everything there, but also has some needs for things that either aren't packaged at all, or are but move too slowly and break often (youtube-dl) I use brew. I love that it installs in my home directory. Linux Brew is awesome to have for that.

I don't expect Linux will ever be a prime focus, but I do wish it would be easier for packages to support Linux. Many times it doesn't require any actual formula changes beyond trivial.

Note: If you are on Arch, AUR is often better than home brew. I don't use Arch on my daily drivers/work machines anymore but deeply miss the AUR :-)

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#225

Post by lucideer »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #109
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?

The problem is that the way they do it breaks the UNIX model. /usr/local is common to all users, but Homebrew gives it the current user's permissions. This consequently creates weirdness if you actually use multiple user accounts.

Exactly why I prefixed my comment with "this is one of the FEW features I do love". The exact technical approach Hombrew ends up taking to a lot of problems always seems not quite right whenever I've dug a little deeper.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#226

Post by senjin »

biktor_gj wrote: post #144
martpie wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not parent, and I'm not going to say it sucks, the project takes a lot of work from a lot of people and I ain't the one pissing on other people's work, it definitely could use some improvements syntax wise though, What was it, brew install? Brew cask? Oh , now is brew cask install... or was it brew install --cask? I get the analogy, but being a package manager, but was it really that bad to use 'brew install', 'brew…

Do you mean apt or apt-get or apt-get install or was it apt-install --get?

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#227

Post by onedognight »

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.

    export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#228

Post by mikepurvis »

lucideer wrote: post #218
mikepurvis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the whole reason for running the outer commands as sudo is so that the inner build/install commands can be run in a far more restricted environment. Because brew runs as your own user, every build has access to your entire home directory, the whole homebrew folder, etc. It's nice in principle to not have to "trust" any of homebrew with sudo, but in reality, the trust surface area is far large…

> every build has access to your entire home directory, the whole homebrew folder, etc. Isn't this just whataboutism though? Yes that's potentially a problem but it's an orthogonal one. So not really relevant to this discussion. A hypothetical solution to the problem in the linked XKCD would be to somehow prevent an attacker accessing your bank, it would not be to allow an attacker to install drivers without your per…

The point is that they wouldn't. Only the core brew utility would, because in almost all cases, it would be immediately downgrading itself to either a dedicated homebrew user, or in the case of builds, to a nobody user who does its work in /tmp and only has write access to the one install path it has been allocated (which is then chowned to the brew user afterward).

The fundamental issue is that the POSIX user model has no concept of one user being strictly less privileged than another, and therefore all impersonations require root.

And note that the situation on Debian and Ubuntu is much worse than either of these models, because every package has an opportunity to run arbitrary commands as root as part of the postinstall and at various other times during the package lifecycle. So basically you've owned yourself the first time you add some user's random PPA and run `apt dist-upgrade` to pull new versions from it.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#229

Post by woodruffw »

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.

Homebrew maintainer here: I'm sorry that we don't meet your expectations.

Two things for your consideration:

1. It's uniquely visible among system package managers. When people have problems with a package in `apt` or `dnf`, they find a community or third-party repository for the package or bug the upstream directly. By contrast, Homebrew has always been visible on GitHub, does not require a special login to a bugtracker on some random domain, and thus receives direct community support volume that we need to address.

2. Homebrew is not an official system package manager. We operate at Apple's whim, which generally ranges between neutral disinterest and actively trying to remove parts of the macOS userspace that we rely on. Many of our changes over the last decade (installing our own Ruby, rolling back custom source options) can be directly traced back to changes that Apple imposes that produce disproportionately greater maintenance effort from us.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#230

Post by 9dev »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #86
GlitchMr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple did help with implementing support for ARM CPUs as mentioned in the changelog: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration." Making sure Homebrew works on ARM Mac devices made sense for Apple. Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business s…

Meanwhile providing money for no reason to Homebrew wouldn't make business sense. As far Apple is concerned, Homebrew works, and providing financial support wouldn't make it work better. This is idiotic.

Try putting on your management hat. Would you approve donating money to some random project that vaguely benefits the users of your platform, with no apparent reason? After all, the Tool seems to work fine and nobody is complaining. You can surely imagine the course of such an initiative inside Apple.
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