How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#21

Post by masklinn » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:15 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #19

masklinn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.) And that's way more up to date than it used to be. > Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form…

What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes. (In that you could probably just install MAS apps from the command line, and if nothing else, you could just build an alternate GUI around that.)

> What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes.

I don't see how it'd solve the primary MAS woes of horrible contributor/developer experience, uncaring maintainership and inflexible sandboxing.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#22

Post by masklinn » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #18

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #13

I've been forcefully switched to OS X recently because work, and overall it's been pretty great (I view it as a well-integrated UI over FreeBSD). A couple of things drive me nuts though: * (the window manager sucks, but that's not the topic. I had to get it out) * it needs a good package manager For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim…

Homebrew installs in /usr/local, not in /usr, and OS updates never touch /usr/local. And if you're paranoid, you can instruct Homebrew to install somewhere else instead.

> OS updates never touch /usr/local.

That's not entirely true. A relatively widespread issue during 10.10 (Yosemite) updates was the installer seemingly locking up and actually moving all the files in /usr/local one by one to then from a backup location veeeery slowly, potentially taking >12h to complete the update rather than a pair of.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#23

Post by curt15 » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #19

masklinn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.) And that's way more up to date than it used to be. > Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form…

What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes. (In that you could probably just install MAS apps from the command line, and if nothing else, you could just build an alternate GUI around that.)

Aren't MAS apps distributed in a self-contained bundles? What package management is required?

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#24

Post by chris_st » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

I guess you have to do this to avoid the name clash with Tigris's delta[0], which is the default if you do `brew install delta`? I'm not sure this is the best solution.

[0] http://delta.tigris.org

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#25

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #19

masklinn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For us ol' bearded folk (at least spiritually), OS X comes with a slew of unix tools we love. It already includes both vim AND emacs! However, these tools are hopelessly outdated: Despite OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" coming out last fall, Vim is still 7.3 (that's from August 2010. 2010!), and Emacs 22 (2007. That's right.) And that's way more up to date than it used to be. > Apple gave MacPorts some support in the form…

What'd be really interesting is if MAS was rebuilt on top of a package manager. That'd solve both the lack of package management, and most of the MAS's woes. (In that you could probably just install MAS apps from the command line, and if nothing else, you could just build an alternate GUI around that.)

[deleted]

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#26

Post by eridius » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:39 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #22

eridius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew installs in /usr/local, not in /usr, and OS updates never touch /usr/local. And if you're paranoid, you can instruct Homebrew to install somewhere else instead.

> OS updates never touch /usr/local. That's not entirely true. A relatively widespread issue during 10.10 (Yosemite) updates was the installer seemingly locking up and actually moving all the files in /usr/local one by one to then from a backup location veeeery slowly, potentially taking >12h to complete the update rather than a pair of.

I heard people mentioning that (for 10.11 btw, not 10.10), but I never saw anyone give any reason for believing that that's what the installer was doing. Furthermore, I had a pretty extensive /usr/local Homebrew installation and my update to 10.11 completed in the expected time.

Besides, even if the installer did do that, the resulting updated OS still had all the same contents in /usr/local.

As far as I'm aware, the only change OS updates have ever made to the /usr/local folder is resetting permissions back to root:wheel.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#27

Post by octavore » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #12

This is still quite a bit more work than publishing to npm: 1. Jump to separate repository 2. Create a .tar.gz with sensitive filename 3. "upload somewhere" 4. Manually update formula, sha, version 4. Push Versus: 1. npm bump && npm publish I ended up automating the formula updating after getting tired of doing that every other day, for a private tap.

I feel your pain, part of the motivation for writing this was that yesterday I wanted to set up a new project, and realized I'd forgotten half the steps. Been thinking that something like https://github.com/aktau/github-release could be helpful for automating the release process, or maybe adding it as a step in a CI workflow.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#28

Post by masklinn » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #26

masklinn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OS updates never touch /usr/local. That's not entirely true. A relatively widespread issue during 10.10 (Yosemite) updates was the installer seemingly locking up and actually moving all the files in /usr/local one by one to then from a backup location veeeery slowly, potentially taking >12h to complete the update rather than a pair of.

I heard people mentioning that (for 10.11 btw, not 10.10), but I never saw anyone give any reason for believing that that's what the installer was doing. Furthermore, I had a pretty extensive /usr/local Homebrew installation and my update to 10.11 completed in the expected time. Besides, even if the installer did do that, the resulting updated OS still had all the same contents in /usr/local. As far as I'm aware, the…

> I heard people mentioning that (for 10.11 btw, not 10.10), but I never saw anyone give any reason for believing that that's what the installer was doing.

because that's exactly what the logs showed it doing: https://discussions.apple.com/message/26856483#26856483 and because the preemptive fix (if you hadn't started the update yet) was moving /usr/local's content elsewhere: https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/

And it was for 10.10. I'm sure people who'd been bitten (or had avoided it through the procedure above) repeated it for 10.11 reflexively or just in case, but the issue was the 10.10 upgrade.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#29

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:55 PM UTC

Homebrew sucks on multi-user systems (especially if the Mac in question has previously been single-user) or after the Mac changes its owner/becomes a shared one (company laptop).

Macports handles this usecase far, far better. Give your users sudo rights and be done. Only thing it desperately lacks is allowing third-party additional repositories like Debian's apt does.

Re: How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew

#30

Post by matt_wulfeck » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 8:58 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #29

Homebrew sucks on multi-user systems (especially if the Mac in question has previously been single-user) or after the Mac changes its owner/becomes a shared one (company laptop). Macports handles this usecase far, far better. Give your users sudo rights and be done. Only thing it desperately lacks is allowing third-party additional repositories like Debian's apt does.

It always bugs me when people don't wipe laptops before handing them off.