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Homebrew 3.0

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Re: Homebrew 3.0

#311

Post by pyro2927 »

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…

I used both MacPorts and Fink prior to Homebrew being released. The fact that it was able to do binary archive installs, and then later Homebrew Cask just made it a far friendlier package manager. I've added a few formulas over the years and am happy to see it continue!

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#312

Post by zymhan »

jdlyga wrote: post #259

I'm definitely grateful that MacOS has a package manager at all. Mac before the unix-like OS X days was like using Windows: you had to hunt for installers or DMG's. Except Mac didn't have the legacy support that Windows aims for: all your programs would break when a major update like MacOS 8 came out.

The bigger pain point for me is macOS still has no system-wide registry of installed applications. You specifically need to keep the uninstaller around for big applications.

So lord help you if the app you want to delete isn't a single .app file in /Applications

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#313

Post by jacobsenscott »

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.

brew is an amazing achievement. It doesn't do random unwanted updates at odd times. It doesn't do anything at all unless you run run it. And it tells you want it will do beforehand. Nobody would have "filled the void" - building software isn't a zero sum game. If someone had something better they would have continued to work on it and it would have "taken over". There, I said it.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#314

Post by quesera »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #254
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 Homebrew was a thing, and had plenty of experience with bsd ports going back to the late 90s. Homebrew was just straight up better, no doubt about it. It wasn't "noobs," "good timing," or "tricky marketing." They were just better, even if still not what these posters desire.

You're imputing far more judgementalness than I intended.

As for better vs worse, let's just say that opinions vary.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#315

Post by ihuman »

rswail wrote: post #119

The majority of the ports and software I want installed are essentially Unix/Linux/GNU environment tools. Macports has always seemed to me to be a more "unix-y" way of doing that, and it works politely with Apple's ways on top of the Unix core (eg locking down the system volume). It also has a very nice "select" and "variants" system that allows you to have multiple versions of a package as well as packages with more…

Why is it bad that homebrew puts files in /usr/local?

Edit: They use /opt if you're on Apple Silicon https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installati...

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#316

Post by apocolyps6 »

personjerry wrote: post #267
anaerobicover wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for developers, no. "Normal" Apple consumers have little reason to use brew.

I think that's a false dichotomy. I think there are plenty of "normal" Apple consumers who may not be an HN-level hacker but would still be considered "developers".

What is a "HN-level hacker"? I write code for a living and I read news on this website. Do I count?

I'm an apple "consumer" because I don't want to think about any hardware gotchas when I'm trying to do my job. That's the same thing I want out of my package manager, sensible defaults I don't have to think about so I can do real work instead.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#317

Post by bzb6 »

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…

Ah, this reminds me of how shitty the maintainers were to me when I said I was using hackintosh (for an issue that had nothing to do with it).

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#318

Post by upbeat_general »

faitswulff wrote: post #125
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Homebrew, and am genuinely appreciative of the amount of effort all the contributors have put in. However, as far as package managers go, it's kind of awful. Homebrew excels as a mechanism to install the latest software, if you don't care about breaking things. However, traditionally a package manager's job is to ensure that if you've installed something, it'll continue to run. If you've ever updated readline v…

Also any random operation can take 20 minutes to complete if you haven't used brew in a while.

You can disable this but I agree, I hate it.

This comment actually just spurred me to find this (https://gist.github.com/jb510/99f12b1ac70f1cf8b780) which may fix the issue of forgetting to manually update.

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#319

Post by latexr »

bartvk wrote: post #63

If you wish to donate, then you can do the creator a favor: https://mxcl.dev/#donate

Without taking away from Max Howell, he hasn’t been with Homebrew for years. Anyone is still free to donate to him (naturally), but those will have no impact on Homebrew. To donate to Homebrew, see https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations

Re: Homebrew 3.0

#320

Post by abathur »

sirn wrote: post #191
SkyMarshal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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`.

I feel similarly and am a little careful about when I choose to take an update.

That said, I think most people want darwin failures to be able to block, so it's mostly about getting on top of them to the point where it's practical to keep them triaged. Domen is working on getting a part-time position funded to work on issues here (https://opencollective.com/nix-macos), though individual package breaks are probably down the list.

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