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Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

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Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#101
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is dog-slow. If this becomes yet another Rust tool that is 10x faster than the one that it replaces: great.

Homebrew is 99% IO-bound and this will be too. Installing (prebuilt) packages doesn't require much logic. If this tool supports parallel downloads, it will be 10x faster than Homebrew, but it won't have anything to do with the language. The issue is finding a hosting provider willing to be DDOS'd for the good of the open-source community.

Hmm I'm sure people said that about Pip before uv came along and was literally 10x faster.

To be fair I haven't noticed Brew being as tediously slow as Pip. Maybe I just use it way less.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#102
post #26

Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew. Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo. Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json A…

One thing that Homebrew does not do easily is to easily allow for creation of universal libraries and binaries - https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/4647

Maybe that could be a place where sapphire differentiates?

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#103
post #74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, normal users don't need to know. They just "brew install ".

I disagree. I need to understand what Homebrew means when it says that a cask is keg-only or whatever, or what it means to tap a cellar or whatever when I wanna add repositories. The documentation and '--help' output also refers to the beer brewing terms, not standard package management terms.

Some reason I just died laughing. Really struggled with all that stuff while building this, just seemed to make no sense in the beginning. Maybe I should do /opt/sapphire/cave, opt/sapphire/cove and opt/sapphire/quarry for mine haha

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).

Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience. (Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)

Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity.

Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#105
post #44

This looks like a fun little project, nice work! I'm not a big fan of keeping the Homebrew terminology though. I never know what a formula, keg, cask, cellar, tap or bottle is. Why not keep to the standard terms of package and repository etc? I don't know beer brewing terminology or how beer brewing is analogous to package management, and I honestly wish that it wasn't something which my tools expect me to learn.

Please kill the Homebrew terminology if you can! Its idiosyncratic names are the bane of my existence; it might have been cute in 2010, but it's frustrated me ever since.

I don't want to memorise their twee names; I'd much rather the name tell me what the entity / operation does by itself.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given homebrew was strictly worse than the tool it displaced, I’m not sure it’s the right question to ask. MacOS package management is strictly marketing based.

That’s not fair. Homebrew has been fantastic. It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

[deleted]

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#107
post #3

What is it doing better than homebrew ?

Given homebrew was strictly worse than the tool it displaced, I’m not sure it’s the right question to ask. MacOS package management is strictly marketing based.

MacPorts is still around, and that's what I use.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not fair. Homebrew has been fantastic. It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).

[deleted]

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#110
post #99

I'm really rooting for this. I can't wait for Homebrew replacements, what a pain it is.

same here. brew’s been great historically but it’s gotten bloated and kinda slow. curious to see if sapphire can keep things lean without sacrificing compatibility.
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