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Homebrew 1.1.0

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Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#121

Post by Sidnicious »

homebrewster wrote: post #75
lisper wrote: post #64

I have very mixed feelings about homebrew. When it works, it is awesome, but when it doesn't it can be a serious nightmare. In particular, homebrew refuses to run under sudo. Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). I have mostly stopped using it for this reason. I understand that running a program that runs third-party scripts under sudo…

This was a problem for me. I installed Homebrew to my home directory [1] and it works great. I no longer need to chown /usr/local or run any commands under sudo. [1] https://gist.github.com/jaymcgavren/bb85914950578edabad190c3...

I do the same (but installed to ~/.homebrew). No issues so far — if anyone knows why this isn't the default, I'd be interested to know.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#122

Post by jessedhillon »

orf wrote: post #114
teacup50 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They phone home (to Google Analytics) by default: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... It's pretty ridiculous. They're giving Google a map of everything individual users install. The only reason it's "anonymous" is that they're relying on Google to throw away personally identifying data before Homebrew sees it.

oh, so a 'echo export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 >> /etc/profile' is too difficult?

Don't you think it's reasonable to make that sort of thing opt-in? This feels like the kind of presumption of a right to observe users that normally makes HN howl.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#124

Post by groovy2shoes »

raimue wrote: post #99
mikepurvis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it desirable to run builds as not-root? If you're concerned about safety, you could maybe "freeze" your homebrew install by chowning /usr/local back to root in between brew invocations.

Very much the reason why MacPorts requires sudo, so it can drop to a less-privileged "macports" user for builds, without putting your own user account at risk.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I find MacPorts to be superior to Homebrew in every way, from writing the ports themselves, to installing them and managing them. I used to use Homebrew some time ago, but when I got my Mac Mini, I decided to forgo it in favor of MacPorts and Pkgsrc (which Joyent also provides binaries of for OSX). Whatever MacPorts doesn't have (a rare occurrence), Pkgsrc tends to have it. If not, writing a MacPort is incredibly easy with their provided DSL.

I was pleasantly surprised that, despite Homebrew taking so much of the OSX package management mind-share these days, MacPorts still has an active and vibrant community going strong. I was also pleasantly surprised by just how well Pkgsrc works on OSX, despite its origins on NetBSD. In fact, Pkgsrc works so well that I've switched to using it on Slackware as my primary package manager for anything not in the base system, preferring it to SlackBuilds.org and sbotools (though I still use sbotools whenever Pkgsrc doesn't have a package I want — which sometimes leads to duplicate dependencies in different paths... still haven't figured out how to avoid that yet...).

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#125

Post by AtticusTheGreat »

There is definitely a lot to like about Homebrew (it's better than macports), but like others have said, when stuff goes wrong you can end up spending an entire day googling, only to end up going down a rabbit hole of archaic and often obsolete commands that may or may not work.

Once you get your environment set up it's fine, but try updating to the most recent Mac OS version with a ruby environment and you'll find pretty much all your gemsets broken in one way or another (if you have anything that needs native building).

I might just be bitter, though, as I spent most of a day working through this exact situation just last week.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#126

Post by AtticusTheGreat »

There is definitely a lot to like about Homebrew (it's better than macports), but like others have said, when stuff goes wrong you can end up spending an entire day googling, only to end up going down a rabbit hole of archaic and often obsolete commands that may or may not work.

Once you get your environment set up it's fine, but try updating to the most recent Mac OS version with a ruby environment and you'll find pretty much all your gemsets broken in one way or another (if you have anything that needs native building).

I might just be bitter, though, as I spent most of a day working through this exact situation just last week.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#127

Post by stephenr »

wwweston wrote: post #97
lisper wrote: post #64

I have very mixed feelings about homebrew. When it works, it is awesome, but when it doesn't it can be a serious nightmare. In particular, homebrew refuses to run under sudo. Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). I have mostly stopped using it for this reason. I understand that running a program that runs third-party scripts under sudo…

> Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). Why is this a really bad idea for a personal machine? The only problems I can think of are some subdirectories that are conventionally given some other user ownership to make running a related server under a specific user, and the problem of putting potentially arbitrary probably unreviewed execu…

> What's the alternative?

Install software as root, eg by invoking sudo.

The "don't compile as root" argument is correct, that too is a bad idea. But that's exactly why traditional "./configure; make; sudo make install" instructions separate the initial build (using the default make target) from a the install target.

It's why binary packages for basically every platform are built using a controlled, non root-user environment, but installed using root-equivalent permissions.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#128

Post by sctb »

__pid_t wrote: post #9

This spyware is awesome! Love how they track everything you do with the use of environment variables.

We've already asked you specifically not to do this, so we've banned the account.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#129

Post by jfb »

samatman wrote: post #67
jfb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this. It's simple enough to install homebrew, to, say, $HOME/.homebrew. I haven't had any problems with this approach, but then, I don't use Ruby, and if I did I wouldn't use homebrew to manage it.

Except when you run Homebrew? I mean, I understood you, I'm fairly sure brew is the only Ruby command I run on a regular basis...

Right, true.

Re: Homebrew 1.1.0

#130

Post by eddieh »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #110
eddieh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ sudo port install texlive +full Have you tried installing TeX Live with Homebrew? I can't even fathom using a package manager that complains about managing packages 'cause it is too hard.

> Error: No available formula with the name "texlive" > ... > You can install it with Homebrew-Cask: > brew cask install mactex And then `brew cask install mactex` works nicely.

Maybe they updated the error message. Here is what it said that last time I tried Homebrew:

   $ brew info texlive
   Installing TeX from source is weird and gross, requires a lot of patches,
   and only builds 32-bit (and thus can't use Homebrew deps on Snow Leopard.)

   We recommend using a MacTeX distribution: https://www.tug.org/mactex/
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