Hi Mike, I’m @bfontaine on GitHub (I helped maintain Homebrew in ~2014-2016). I’m always impressed at your longevity as a maintainer; it’s been like what, 16+ years you’ve been maintaining Homebrew and you’re still here, still shipping new features! Thank you for everything!
17 in September. Thanks for all your great work at the time! Hope you’re well <3
Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
181–190 of 380 posts
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#182I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are: - Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained, - Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing, - Better UX. Obviously I…
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#183Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#184Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have an example? Sounds interesting.
Here's my modest collection of global tools I install in my dotfiles: https://github.com/JanPokorny/dotfiles/blob/master/dot_confi... Projects then have their own dependencies, e.g. https://github.com/i-am-bee/agentstack/blob/main/mise.toml Mise also has a task runner which automatically uses correct tools. Onboarding a new team member is super easy now, they just need Mise, "mise install" and they're up.
mise use -g somepackage --pin
I can commit/rollback to known good versions. To upgrade: mise up -il
Not so long ago, I was outspoken against mise. I've since come around. It truly is a fantastic tool.Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#186Claude found evidence of an exfiltration malware on my laptop and I inmediately wiped the device and started again. Revoked all my keys, rotated all my passwords. And now I pray the damage is contained.
I can’t believe that Google would have let this slip through. I probably wasn't the only one that got caught out.
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#187I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are: - Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained, - Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing, - Better UX. Obviously I…
I use nix-darwin and also manage my homebrew packages with it. Maybe you can take a look at that. May I ask for what do you use it at work? I have a few places I think nix might suit but I can’t really put my finger on it.
We use Nix at work for all sorts of stuff. Binaries run in production from Nix paths. Software we build has dependencies in Nix. People on workstations run commands from Nix paths. The OS is not Nix, but the Nix package manager looks like it’s on its way to consuming most of our dependencies. It is not used for building or deploying our code, though.
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#188I have switched my full OS-level dev env to https://mise.jdx.dev/ from Homebrew+pipx+npm, initially as an experiment but found out that it actually works amazingly well. Many things get installed directly from GitHub releases or a corresponding package manager (uv, pnpm, go get ...), zero glue code to "repackage", zero version lag. You can install any arbitrary version of a package, even multiple ones at once, and dy…
I tried to use it for system wide things, but found it didn't work as well for me with things that I wanted to just be tools where I didn't care what specific version it was as long as it was more or less current, Helix, NeoVim, RipGrep, etc.
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#189Thanks for all the hard work. We are not many [1], but Homebrew has been a great way to quickly bootstrap an environment in immutable Linux distributions. Note that certain operating systems such as Universal Blue's Bazzite (1.28%), Bluefin (0.49%) and Aurora (0.28%) default to bundling Homebrew [2]. [1] https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/os-version/365d/ [2] https://github.com/ublue-os/brew
The concept of a "userspace package manager" is something I would expect Linux to have figured out twenty years ago. It's ridiculous that the usual situation for non-root users is "you can't install XY but feel free to build from source". Homebrew, Mise and Nix are filling that hole now. (Flatpak is more oriented towards GUI apps, and Snap... exists.)
Re: Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
#190I have switched my full OS-level dev env to https://mise.jdx.dev/ from Homebrew+pipx+npm, initially as an experiment but found out that it actually works amazingly well. Many things get installed directly from GitHub releases or a corresponding package manager (uv, pnpm, go get ...), zero glue code to "repackage", zero version lag. You can install any arbitrary version of a package, even multiple ones at once, and dy…
Hmm, `mise use -g docker-cli` works for me. `docker compose` is a bit trickier – it gets installed as `docker-cli-plugin-docker-compose`, but docker-cli doesn’t seem to pick it up. I’ve added a symlink as `docker-compose` for the time being. Also using brew for casks, and I think there’s a couple tools I couldn’t install with mise (e.g. pngpaste and zbar for scanning QR codes from screenshots).
Zbar seems to provide prebuilt binaries here https://linuxtv.org/downloads/zbar/binaries/ (haven't checked it myself)
Thanks for the docker tip!