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You’re referring to Max Howell, who started Homebrew but hasn’t been part of it for over a decade. Max has been out of Homebrew for longer than he was ever in it, so everything you associate between the two is wrong.
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Can you supply supporting evidence (links etc.) regarding "the author was being extremely upset (...) about not passing a Google interview" and "Homebrew having... weird design decisions"?
(I'm not the other poster) They're probably referring to this tweet from Max Howell [0] > Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off. I personally wouldn't hold that against him (or Homebrew). We also don't really know if Google rejected him based on the binary tree, or if it was something else (personality?). [0] https://x.com/mx…
No one should hold that against Homebrew. Max was already not part of it when that happened and he does not speak for the remaining team.
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My dumb brain had to read it 3 times before realizing that by saying "the findings were not inconsistent with what I'd expect" you meant "the findings _were_ consistent with what I'd expect"
One should try to avoid using double negatives in both speech and programming to make intent more obvious ;-)
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I've been using MacPorts for as long as I've wanted a macOS package manager, and it's been working very well for me.
Anyone know why Homebrew overtook MacPorts? I only have a vague recollection of a Rails colleague pushing me to switch circa 2013 or so and haven't given it much thought since, but it (MacPorts) seemed to be similarly ubiquitous prior.
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Apple should have written it themselves. It's embarrassing that they didn't. Nonprofit Linux distros with one-millionth the resources manage to write package managers and run repos, and then with MacOS, Apple gives you diddly-squat.
Apple would certainly favor macports over that rubbish ruby thing. Ports are from FreeBSD, MacOS is from FreeBSD.
* Apple has no aversion to Ruby, and on the contrary has multiple developers pushing for it. They themselves had MacRuby, a project that allowed one to create Mac OS X (at the time) applications with Ruby.¹
* The reason there’s even an Xcode command line tools package available officially from Apple is because of Homebrew. A third-party made it first by extracting the necessary bits and then Apple officially supported it.²
* There’s a liaison between Homebrew and Apple, who helped during the Intel to Apple Silicon transition.³
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20100908131627/http://developer....
² I know this from a reliable source and it is public information, but it was so long ago it’s hard to find.
³ The official Homebrew Twitter account tweeted about this at the time. I no longer have a Twitter account so can’t dig it up.
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Anyone know why Homebrew overtook MacPorts? I only have a vague recollection of a Rails colleague pushing me to switch circa 2013 or so and haven't given it much thought since, but it (MacPorts) seemed to be similarly ubiquitous prior.
MacPorts was slower (bringing in its own dependencies for everything meant longer build steps) and required sudo more. There were some annoying fiddly parts that made it seem like the homebrew users around you were having more fun exploring packages. It was also exciting how many packages and casks were in homebrew and it was easy to make your own. Also, back then there were lots of people experiencing package manage…
With so many other package managers available, I often wish something else was the de facto package manager on macOS. Something like pkgsrc, which follows conventions much better and is thereby much easier to manage.
This is the pkgsrc-based package manager I use on macOS. It's simple and has the packages I need. https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/
Note that Pkgsrc is a NetBSD-derived project.
The Joyent folks leveraged it to allow their customers, who were perhaps not as familiar with Solaris/SmartOS, a larger pool of packages. Pkgsrc was running on Solaris before Joyent, Joyent built on top of it.
The main attack vector IMHO is the simple fact that one can sneak in new packages with malicious intent by simply contributing a new formula. The team of maintainers is too small to audit all of the newly contributed formulae. I'm suprised that this attack vector wasn't part of the audit.
> ... These avenues do not necessarily violate Homebrew’s core security assumptions (which assume trustworthy formulae),...