Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.
Homebrew's very up to date, without that cutting-edge quality risking system stability (since that's totally separate) and has an incredible number of supported packages, including tons of closed-source stuff, out of the box . No hunting down PPAs or obscure unofficial back-port packages or anything. The only Linux package managers I've seen even approach it (not match, but approach) are from bleeding-edge distros li…
However, my aversion to homebrew goes beyond taste: my experience with homebrew is rife with breakages. To be fair we were trying to use it in a CI system, which will very quickly reveal a buggy system. By contrast, apt/dnf are rock solid when used in CI.
An actual example: we tried providing our own recipe to install a particular version of libicu. This triggered an upgrade of some dependency; that triggered an upgrade of libicu to a different version than 68. The command exited with a successful status. A real package manager would have detected the package conflict and reported it, giving you resolution options, or errored out in a non-interactive terminal.
Why were we trying to pin versions in the first place? You guessed it, package breakages.