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Homebrew 3.0

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#281

Post by [deleted] »

404mm wrote: post #250
talentedcoin wrote: post #201

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 Homebre…

MacPorts seem to be very “user” friendly for people with Unix and/or Gentoo (maybe a bit Arch too) background. I have experience with all three and when I needed to decide in between HomeBrew and MacPorts, it was very simple choice. I tried both to get the actual experience and stuck with MacPorts. All the naming in HomeBrew was just too confusing too me.

[deleted]

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#282

Post by anaerobicover »

volta83 wrote: post #169
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.

> There, I said it. What a waste of bytes and bandwidth. "[homebrew] It’s the worst package manager I’ve used" is true for all users that have only used one package manager. The opposite claim ("it's the best I've used") would simultaneously be true. You could at least have mentioned _why_ and that could have kickstarted a meaningful discussion, but instead your comment is the equivalent on a thumbs down in a youtube…

Pot, meet kettle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26037357

> volta83 1 hour ago | parent [–] | on: Homebrew 3.0

> 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.

> reply

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#283

Post by djrogers »

foobarian wrote: post #161
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.

I only use it because IT forces Macs down our throats. It's understandable, the hardware is light years ahead of any other manufacturer, along with the OS support. But I just do the bare minimum of setup to get VNC and SSH working and GTFO to a proper remote dev box.

> But I just do the bare minimum of setup to get VNC and SSH working

Lucky for you those are both fully supported out-of-the-box, and have been for a couple of decades. Sounds like your IT team is forcing the right solution down your throats.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#284

Post by tristor »

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…

> But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either.

Hard disagree. Maybe that situation has improved for MacPorts, but when I made a decision to move from a Thinkpad running FreeBSD to a MBP for work, I gravitated immediately towards MacPorts and found it to be horrendously broken and significantly less friendly than using Ports on FreeBSD. I was expecting a similar UX, and found something that had the trappings of Ports with none of the underlying maintenance that makes it actually work.

Then someone recommended Homebrew. I tried it, and it worked perfectly the first time. I actually kept both on my system for awhile and tried to make MacPorts work, but eventually over the years I gave up on that and I've been a Homebrew user now for more than 5 years. Homebrew is strictly better in the most important factor: It actually works.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#285

Post by jack_riminton »

the_other wrote: post #269
personjerry wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's what I want. I build web apps for a living, and I used to do it by contracting. I don't have time, patience or interest for fiddly configuration. I want a mostly-good initial experience so I can get on with my work rather than mess about with my tools. I'm aware there's some gain to be had by knowing more about my tools, but the payoff isn't obvious enough to make me change my ways. Thanks for being mostly-gre…

Exactly, it’s the same reason I use Mac instead of Linux. I want to make things. I don’t want to waste time fiddling with endless verbose details I don’t need to know

Yours, A Noob

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#286

Post by gonehome »

404mm wrote: post #250
talentedcoin wrote: post #201

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 Homebre…

MacPorts seem to be very “user” friendly for people with Unix and/or Gentoo (maybe a bit Arch too) background. I have experience with all three and when I needed to decide in between HomeBrew and MacPorts, it was very simple choice. I tried both to get the actual experience and stuck with MacPorts. All the naming in HomeBrew was just too confusing too me.

Gentoo is probably the most user hostile Linux distribution I can think of other than ones purposely austere for learning (LFS) or parody (Suicide Linux).

If Mac Ports requires that level of knowledge to be user friendly it’s no surprise they lost.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#287

Post by ihuman »

kemayo wrote: post #270
Hamuko wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 al…

That one doesn't seem unreasonable. They have a "we only support tagged releases" policy. mpv moved away from tagging releases for a bit, and their latest tagged release couldn't build on current MacOS. So they switched it to the part of their system (casks) that supports downloading and installing arbitrary binaries instead. I think it's a fair conflict, too. For a package manager, saying "just download and compile…

To add to what you said, the formula came back a week and a half later when they returned to tagging releases.

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/82a45025682...

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#288

Post by EForEndeavour »

OskarS wrote: post #69
WJW wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple would be fools to not support it financially. Since people are already doing an excellent job for free, why would they start paying them? Clearly the lack of Apple funding has not hurt the project thus far.

I mean, I don't run any billion dollar companies, so what do I know, but Apple donating a couple of million to ensure that Homebrew stays active seems like a no-brainer investment to me. Yeah, Homebrew has been doing this work for free thus far, but open source projects die all the time. It's very much in Apple's interest to ensure this one doesn't.

Side note: Apple has been a trillion-dollar company since 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#289

Post by one-punch »

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.

I use nixpkgs and home-manager for a consistent package management and configuration across MacOS and Linux (NixOS), which others also reported great success [1]. As noted in the article [1], home-manager has a steeper learning curve, but is much more powerful (e.g., supports providing development dependencies and environment, or even extend to Ops).

For the interested, search for some variants of “homebrew home-manager nix”, and you may find lots of resources [2][3][4].

[1]: https://lucperkins.dev/blog/home-manager/

[2]: https://www.softinio.com/post/moving-from-homebrew-to-nix-pa...

[3]: https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/macos-nix-setup/

[4]: https://dev.to/louy2/use-nix-on-macos-as-a-homebrew-user-22d

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#290

Post by panopticon »

busterarm wrote: post #273
paultopia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You left out the entire generation of developers who are totally disconnected from how systems work and think that "it runs on my machine" should be good enough. Brew has lowered the bar enough that lots of folks simply don't have a clue how to deploy anything and worse, don't have a clue how to troubleshoot when something goes wrong in production. Obviously it's a double-edged sword. It's good to not waste time conf…

I don't understand this critique. Is this a complaint about package managers in general, or is `brew install git` lowering the bar from `apt install git`?
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