I use homebrew like a black box. I’m glad it exists, but I have no idea how it works and why it’s so complicated. When something breaks and Google is no help I just nuke it and start from scratch. It’s only happened twice in more than a decade, but I still have the feeling that I was better off compiling stuff manually and cultivating a tidy /usr/local/bin like I did in early 2000s. But it’s probably rose-colored gla…
I think you’re right about the rose-colored nostalgia: it’s easy to forget how far behind people got on updates. I remember so many support emails where someone had hit a bug which had been patched a year earlier but never thought to install it. A couple of times where people reinvented something which had been added to PHP in the meantime because they didn’t know it was there.
Homebrew 4.0.0
131–140 of 403 posts
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#132I use homebrew like a black box. I’m glad it exists, but I have no idea how it works and why it’s so complicated. When something breaks and Google is no help I just nuke it and start from scratch. It’s only happened twice in more than a decade, but I still have the feeling that I was better off compiling stuff manually and cultivating a tidy /usr/local/bin like I did in early 2000s. But it’s probably rose-colored gla…
How to nuke it? Just in case...
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#133Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Linux for the past 18 years or so, but damn do the M1 macs look interesting. How does one manage packages on a mac?
Excluding 3rd party tools like Homebrew, one dosn't. The native 'package manager' is the Apple App Store. You can also manually download and install .dmg files of applications (much like .deb or .rpm).
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#135As an old hand who was around when homebrew started, I feel obliged to let people know there are alternatives. If you find brew's take-over-your-system-and-youll-thank-me approach off putting, and/or you value stability over the coolness factor, MacPorts is still alive and well ( https://www.macports.org ), and in-fact has basically all the same packages brew does. In 18 years of using MacPorts, it's never messed up…
I used to be a staunch macports evangelist but ended up switching to homebrew. I've found it to be much simpler. And, as a counter to your experience of not having it mess up a machine, every time you upgrade macOS to the next major version you have to jump through some hoops to get it to play ball again. Painful. At some point I gave up on the hoops and installed homebrew instead and haven't looked back.
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#136While I use Homebrew on my Mac — it is a major risk. I am afraid that the project is not following strict security policies and will be compromised at some point. Evil package or evil version of brew can steal or modify my data. I think this will also hurt the Mac platform. I wish Apple would invest some effort into building an App Store for cli programs. While it may be complicated for the community(require signing,…
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#137As an old hand who was around when homebrew started, I feel obliged to let people know there are alternatives. If you find brew's take-over-your-system-and-youll-thank-me approach off putting, and/or you value stability over the coolness factor, MacPorts is still alive and well ( https://www.macports.org ), and in-fact has basically all the same packages brew does. In 18 years of using MacPorts, it's never messed up…
I used to be a staunch macports evangelist but ended up switching to homebrew. I've found it to be much simpler. And, as a counter to your experience of not having it mess up a machine, every time you upgrade macOS to the next major version you have to jump through some hoops to get it to play ball again. Painful. At some point I gave up on the hoops and installed homebrew instead and haven't looked back.
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#138Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#139> brew update will now be run automatically less often (every 24 hours rather than every 5 minutes) and these auto-updates will be much faster as they no longer need to perform the slow git fetch of the huge homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps’ Git repositories. Excellent! Thanks to the brew team for this — it was always frustrating to install something and have to wait for a full, slow update first.
I was just wondering, have they considered storing all that in an SQLite file? And then you could refresh the file every 6 hours, say, and post it on a CDN?
> curl -sI https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.json | grep content-length => 19898457 (~19.9MB)
> curl -sI https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.json | grep content-length => 4023930 (~4MB)
But the JSON API has been around for a while so brew 4.0 just makes use of it by default.
Brew 3.3 added an off-by-default HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API bool to let you install from brew's JSON-based API instead of checking out the large (and slow) homebrew/core and homebrew/taps repos: https://formulae.brew.sh/docs/api/
Brew 4 just makes that the default and deprecates the env var (you can use HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1 if you still want to check out the git repos for some reason).
Re: Homebrew 4.0.0
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richer how, exactly? I fundamentally don't 'get' what richness they actually need. If anything they need money, of course, and to know their software works for their users. Prior to release have a test system install the full base, test those packages work, and you know anything less will work too.
I haven't looked at what they're actually collecting, but here's a few things that come to mind: - Time to install packages - Versions of things - Has the compilation (when required) failed? What dependency versions are installed? - CPU architecture - OS version ... There's a lot more that can be sent from the client that's not available on the server side. > I fundamentally don't 'get' what richness they actually ne…