How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

> It drives me crazy that Apple removed one the most amazing features of *nix systems: a unified software repository.

It's not a feature of unices, it's a feature of _Linux_ (Ian Murdoch called it "the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry"[0]).

The vast majority of unices never had a "unified software repository", and BSDs (probably the least indirect ancestor of OSX) have port trees, which at the time OSX was born (ignoring the NeXTSTEP ancestry which predates "modern" BSDs and builds directly from 4.3BSD) were a very different beast and not something suitable proprietary unices (because Apple wasn't going to give the OSX commit bit to randos).

And hell, both apt and rpm were busy _being born_, the premier package managers at the time were raw dpkg and pms(1). And pkgtool[1] I guess?

[0] http://ianmurdock.com/solaris/how-package-management-changed...

[1] http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php

I've been forcefully switched to OS X recently because work, and overall it's been pretty great (I view it as a well-integrated UI over FreeBSD). A couple of things drive me nuts though:

* (the window manager sucks, but that's not the topic. I had to get it out)

* it needs a good package manager

For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.)

So some enterprising folk come to the rescue: Fink, Homebrew, Macports...

Homebrew installs over /usr, so come the next OS update, all that gets squashed. Macports installs into /opt/local, but somehow doesn't survive an OS update. Also, when I tried installing SciPy it went and recompiled GCC4 from source. Guys, the 90s called, and it's been shown that recompiling from source for each user isn't worth the effort.

Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form of equipment, so there's some hints of their preferred method. But the core WTF is this: why doesn't OSX integrate a package manager for its unixy side?

Given both the outdated vim/emacs/etc. releases and they've handled the Mac App Store, would you want Apple to be running the platform's main package manager?

Do I wish the 3rd party ones could be better integrated with the OS? Sure. But I'm definitely thankful it isn't Apple calling the shots (or more likely, releasing it and then refusing to call any shots at all for 8 years).

> For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.)

And that's way more up to date than it used to be.

> Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form of equipment, so there's some hints of their preferred method. But the core WTF is this: why doesn't OSX integrate a package manager for its unixy side?

Yeah who hasn't dreamt of a package manager handled like MAS.

I'd be happy if Apple helped package managers more, contributed (financially) to them and better took them in account or discussed stuff with them wrt major releases (see: Yosemite homebew woes), but I'm really quite glad the community is completely in charge of macports or homebrew or nix.

What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes. (In that you could probably just install MAS apps from the command line, and if nothing else, you could just build an alternate GUI around that.)