Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt • Hacker News Board

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#11

Post by seemaze » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

c-hendricks wrote: post #9

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #2

man the things people come up with to avoid writing bash scripts

What shell scripts would help here? I love me some shell scripting but always reached for debfoster before falling in love with Pac-Man's `-Qe` and `-Qt` Edit: oh this aptfile doesn't do the one thing I actually use brew bundle for: cleaning up the mess of leftover packages

I've been loving the Alpine Package Keeper, especially easily maintaining desired packaging state in /etc/apk/world

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Package_Keeper#Worl...

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#12

Post by lifetimerubyist » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

c-hendricks wrote: post #9

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #2

man the things people come up with to avoid writing bash scripts

What shell scripts would help here? I love me some shell scripting but always reached for debfoster before falling in love with Pac-Man's `-Qe` and `-Qt` Edit: oh this aptfile doesn't do the one thing I actually use brew bundle for: cleaning up the mess of leftover packages

What is this tool solving that I can't do with apt+bash already?

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#13

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

Put in my mise.toml :)

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#14

Post by letmeinhere » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

aconfmgr[https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr] is a kinda similar project for pacman-based distributions.

The difference is that it strives to track all non-user files, (not just packages, and especially /etc), but you can adopt it partially.

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#15

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

pzmarzly wrote: post #7

Looking at internal/commands/install.go, it only installs new packages, but doesn't uninstall removed ones. That's the biggest benefit of Brew bundle gone. BTW how much of it is vibe coded?

[deleted]

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#16

Post by jraph » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

This appears to be a Show HN.

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#17

Post by pzmarzly » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

curt15 wrote: post #10

Brew got one thing right that no Linux package manager seems to emulate: it doesn't require root for normal operations and even goes so far as to error out if running as root ( https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-does-homebrew-say-sudo-is-bad ).

It needs world-writtable /opt/homebrew, so I guess a Linux equivalent would be Nix (which IIUC requires writable /nix).

For something that only uses your home folder, I recommend checking out mise https://mise.jdx.dev/

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#18

Post by exploderate » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

So, this is better than `dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections`? Oh, because it's partial?

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#19

Post by Arrowmaster » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

I hate the Aptfile format after looking at it.

The ppa directive hints that this is intended for Ubuntu because otherwise installing PPAs is a great way to break a non Ubuntu distro.

The deb directive uses the old and soon to be deprecated .list file extension. DEB822 format is the replacement.

The key directive adds the key as globally trusted for all repos instead of locking it to a specific repo as recommended by Debian. I think this is required under the new DEB822 repo format.

Re: Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt

#20

Post by hiciu » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

curt15 wrote: post #10

Brew got one thing right that no Linux package manager seems to emulate: it doesn't require root for normal operations and even goes so far as to error out if running as root ( https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-does-homebrew-say-sudo-is-bad ).

"let's allow any user process to modify my binaries" is not something to be proud of...