Context for those unaware: the commenter, mikemcquaid, is the project lead for Homebrew.
Thank you, his arguments totally makes sense, only the part that makes me icky is: > There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
> Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Exactly. I’ve been using MacPorts for ages and I love it.
What would be great is a Homebrew-compatible system that doesn't cut off support for older machines. I have a 3.8 GHz Quad core i5 iMac that still crushes, yet Homebrew has determined that I'm just too old and icky[1] to work with anymore. I had to move over to MacPorts, which is surprisingly nice, but I still miss brew. Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks. 1: https://docs.brew.sh/S…
To be fair, Apple stopped providing security fixes for Mojave ~4+ years ago, and there have been 7 or 8 new os releases since then… I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything
I think MacPorts still supports PowerPC Macs. I would need to rebuild my G5 to verify it because the hard disk is long dead, but last time I checked, it worked.
I get it - it’s a different beast with very different ideas behind it, but MacPorts is BSD-solid, and that’s a lot.
> power user tool like homebrew. That makes no sense then. A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. Take the training wheels off it and then it'll be a power user tool.
> A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.
This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.
> A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.
This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.
People who downgraded to Sonoma are the definition of an edge case, maybe you hear from some of them on HN and it sounds like a big group but this is a niche of a niche.
If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”. There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually hav…
thank you for all you (and your co-maintainers) do for the community!
Why does the speed of a package manager matter? I'm being sincere too. I have used countless package managers, and speed is not an attribute of any of them that I have noticed.
If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”. There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually hav…
What drove the choice to use Rust for an official frontend?
If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”. There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually hav…
I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend. I've personally been migrating (slowly) to using nix to manage my Mac's software, but there are a ton of limitations which lead me to rely on homebrew anyway. The speed ups will be appreciated.
> I appreciate the push for an official rust frontend
Why? I think I am seriously starting to contract as case of FOMO. I feel like Rust is rapidly gaining territory everyday. I mean, that's fine and all, I suppose. I have never used it, so I have no real opinions on the language.
Thank you, his arguments totally makes sense, only the part that makes me icky is: > There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Since I enabled HOMEBREW_DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENCY, downloads have improved for me to the point where download speed is no longer an issue.
If your version is 5.0.0 or newer, concurrency is already active by default.
Thank you, his arguments totally makes sense, only the part that makes me icky is: > There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Since I enabled HOMEBREW_DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENCY, downloads have improved for me to the point where download speed is no longer an issue.
Yeah I don’t know how people are saying it’s slow. If you have 5000 packages installed maybe?