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Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

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Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#61

Post by QuercusMax »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #41
vitorsr wrote: post #22

Thanks for all the hard work. We are not many [1], but Homebrew has been a great way to quickly bootstrap an environment in immutable Linux distributions. Note that certain operating systems such as Universal Blue's Bazzite (1.28%), Bluefin (0.49%) and Aurora (0.28%) default to bundling Homebrew [2]. [1] https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/365d/ [2] https://github.com/ublue-os/brew

The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago. It's ridiculous that the usual situation for non-root users is "you can't install XY but feel free to build from source". Homebrew, Mise and Nix are filling that hole now. (Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps, and Snap... exists.)

I haven't looked much into snap but it seems very heavyweight from the few things I've tried, which downloaded what looked like an entire OS and filled up my disk and RAM. And the fact that you run `snapd` to install a package is just... odd.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#62

Post by stouset »

philistine wrote: post #53

The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple! I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.

If anything, the overwhelming majority of Apple enthusiasts have gone all-in on Apple Silicon. I sincerely doubt those using old Macs as servers are anything but a rounding error.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#63

Post by jamesgill »

I know this runs on Linux too. As a Linux user, I'm unclear on why I might use this instead of apt or dnf, for example. Any Linux users out there have experience with both Homebrew and one of these?

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#64

Post by jdxcode »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #15

I have switched my full OS-level dev env to https://mise.jdx.dev/ from Homebrew+pipx+npm, initially as an experiment but found out that it actually works amazingly well. Many things get installed directly from GitHub releases or a corresponding package manager (uv, pnpm, go get ...), zero glue code to "repackage", zero version lag. You can install any arbitrary version of a package, even multiple ones at once, and dy…

mise kind of supports dependencies, just not in the way people expect coming from any other package manager. The dependencies in mise are not automatic and all of them need to be manually defined. They're to get around ordering issues since mise installs in parallel, e.g.: if you use "pipx:black" you need to wait for python to finish installing. (This is the "depends" option on tools")

This is intentional as mise is not intended to be a full bootstrapping solution in the way homebrew/nix is, mise is designed to be an overlay on top of existing systems. So if you want to manage python with brew and black with mise it basically just works without extra configuration. I think this design decision has paid off in spades. It sounds like a drawback but at the end of the day it's probably the #1 reason users find mise easy to use.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#65

Post by shawkinaw »

Could really use a good rollback mechanism, is there one in the works perchance? I have broken my home server multiple times with bad InfluxDB and Grafana updates, and rollback was a huge pain. I’ve now disabled cleanup so old versions of packages are kept, but there must be a better way.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#66

Post by klodolph »

I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are:

- Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained,

- Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing,

- Better UX.

Obviously I miss the reproducibility of Nix environments and the ability to easily create my own flakes with specific packages, but on the balance, Brew has won me back. (I still like Nix, and FWIW we use Nix at work.)

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#68

Post by cosmic_cheese »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #41
vitorsr wrote: post #22

Thanks for all the hard work. We are not many [1], but Homebrew has been a great way to quickly bootstrap an environment in immutable Linux distributions. Note that certain operating systems such as Universal Blue's Bazzite (1.28%), Bluefin (0.49%) and Aurora (0.28%) default to bundling Homebrew [2]. [1] https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/365d/ [2] https://github.com/ublue-os/brew

The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago. It's ridiculous that the usual situation for non-root users is "you can't install XY but feel free to build from source". Homebrew, Mise and Nix are filling that hole now. (Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps, and Snap... exists.)

At the very least, Linux package managers should have some concept of different layers of packages.

For example, there might be layers for “system” (core components), “environment” (display manager, DE, etc), and “user”, each of which are maintained fully separately so they can’t ever step on each others’ toes and break things. Yes, it means there will be some redundancy but for all the trouble and complexity it’s saving I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#69

Post by broxit »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #50
broxit wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see that Homebrew is taking security seriously. Still, I want to minimize the number of parties who can quickly get new code onto my machine. Your doc says "Human review of each release." What does that actually entail? uv had a release at 10:21am yesterday with 7,060 additions and 2,409 deletions. The new release was available in homebrew at 11:46am. What human review happened there? I don't know of any othe…

Our automation or a human submitted a PR, it was built and tested in our sandboxed ephemeral CI environments, a human Homebrew maintainer reviewed the CI results and PR diff and approved it for merge which happened automatically if so. If the ask is "who reviewed the diff": yes, a human didn't do that. That's not actually happening for all packages in any meaningful large ecosystem. I'm still unconvinced a cooldown s…

> Even in that case, my suggestion would be that we just run it in our own CI and block package release.

I agree.

> open source security scanner that runs on all Homebrew packages and requires a cooldown.

I think that is where all this is going in the longterm.

Until then, any upstream shenanigans are more likely to surface in hours 0-48 after a new release than hours 0-4.

Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

#70

Post by mikemcquaid »

klodolph wrote: post #66

I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are: - Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained, - Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing, - Better UX. Obviously I…

Very glad to hear this, thanks for posting.
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