I will likely never move off 10.14 due to hardware and 32-bit software requirements. When will homebrew stop supporting this? I would have stayed on 10.12 but homebrew stopped working well on that after it became unsupported.
Homebrew 3.0
331–340 of 516 posts
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I used gentoo for a few years and found it to be very pleasant, with a great wiki. The only reason I ever stopped using it is because I realized how senseless it was to build everything from source on a laptop with questionable thermal characteristics. Running laptop fans full tilt for hours on end a few times a week evidently exceeds their expected duty cycle, who'd have thunk, but I had to replace the fan in my T60p twice before I learned this lesson. Building everything with Macports would have the same problem, except worse because mac laptops were never as easy to repair as thinkpads, particularly not in recent years.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#333Earlier 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…
How is that better than a pm specifically designed for Mac?
It probably depends on what you want?
If you like treating your Mac like a very MacMacMac pet, a pm designed for Mac is probably better.
If you'd like to treat your Mac like UnixMac livestock, you probably want a cross-platform pm.
Using Nix means the core of my dev needs are met by config shared between my NixOS and macOS systems, with some idiomatic unshareable bits around the edges.
(I don't want to trivialize the gaps or over-sell Nix here. Nix forms a foundation for accomplishing this, but I do still have non-trivial bootstrap scripts for macOS.)
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#334Earlier 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…
About 11 years ago I moved over to then OS X and Homebrew was very new compared to MacPorts at the time. I started with the more established MacPorts, but quickly became frustrated with how many broken and outdated packages were hosted on MacPorts. So I moved over to Homebrew and haven't looked back. This is not to say that Homebrew is perfect; there's lots of big and little things I'd change. But I'd argue that at l…
I'm in that same boat. Homebrew irks some people, but for me it's always just worked to the point that I just don't have to think about it, ever. That's what I really want from a package manager: to be able to forget that it's there and start taking it for granted.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#335Earlier 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…
How does it "command you how to use your computer?" A brew formula is a simple ruby script that lists the packages dependencies, and calls "make; make install". Typically it allows you to set any autoconfig vars and remembers them for next time. This is literally just a thin layer of abstraction over grabbing the tarball and installing the software yourself.
Also brew does not stop you from installing a piece of software literally any other way you prefer if for some reason you don't like what the brew formula is doing, including just creating your own tap.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#336Earlier 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".
Homebrew has clear value even if you aren't a developer. It's the best way to install a whole lot of software, not just dev tools.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
>turned down by Apple and Google It was Google. Because he didn't know what a binary tree was or something similar during the infamous Whiteboard test. But I mean it make perfect sense. Google is all about building AI, ML, Algorithm, K8S etc. Complexity is their KPI, usefulness is not. So may be it isn't so much a bad thing after all. He wouldn't have fit in. Edit: I guess the tone didn't shine through. The "all abou…
I completely disagree with this comment. Not to mention the comments to his Quora answer, suggesting he should try a TPM position... people are so out of touch. The main problem is that he went through the standard interview process. To prevent bias you need to maintain a consistent interview process and bar. All interviewers in big tech have annual trainings about this. If someone underperforms it's considered bad j…
This seems off - based on most interactions Googlers and especially ex-Googlers, arrogance must be a practical requirement to work there.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#338One 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 honestly don't know the backstory on why you "hate to say it", and personally was a NeXT developer 25 years ago which I mention for context that I feel I missed out on something preferable in MacPorts, having found homebrew adequate.
No real backstory I guess. I found Homebrew unpleasant to use for a lot of the reasons gone through in this thread -- mostly just the "rolling distro" nature of it -- so I was a dedicated user of MacPorts. My experience is probably further biased by the fact that I was using the package manager on OS X to deal with Python stuff at the time, so the versioning issues definitely bit me. But at some point, using MacPorts just started to feel like swimming against the tide.
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This means that all users on the system share the same MacPorts software. This has an additional impact that it means that it requires privilege to install software there. > Homebrew, on the other hand, uses the system toolchain and tries to avoid using root. What? Homebrew wants you to change ownership of /usr/local to your individual user and refuses to run without doing so. How is that any different as far "as a…
Huh? I'm on Big Sur running homebrew. 'ls -l /usr' reveals that /usr/local is root:wheel just like all other folders under /usr. How exactly is homebrew changing ownership?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16432071/how-to-fix-home...
Dunno if it needs this now anymore -- i think they moved to /usr/local/Homebrew some time ago -- but this was a big deal for a few years
Re: Homebrew 3.0
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance you're on Apple Silicon? For some reason homebrew uses /usr/local on Intel macs and /opt/homebrew on ARM macs. Anyway, this requirement is well documented and not new: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues?q=is%3Aissue+%2Fusr%... http://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Installatio... Homebrew asks users (on Intel macs) to change the ownership of /usr/local to their local user. And it refuses to…
> Homebrew asks users (on Intel macs) to change the ownership of /usr/local to their local user. Nope - intel Mac on Big Sur: drogers@SJCMACJDYMD6M ~ % ls -l /usr [snip] drwxr-xr-x 15 root wheel 480 Dec 14 20:10 local [end snip] And for the record, neither of your links support your claim.
This changed in the last few years (I don't recall the exact date), but it absolutely was the way that brew operated for many years.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1393/are-my-permis...
https://superuser.com/questions/1264673/chown-usr-local-oper...