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Homebrew 4.0.0

brew.sh

221–230 of 403 posts

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#221
post #215
post #67

As 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…

MacPorts makes no effort to not look abandoned. It's very much 'the old way' of doing things from the look of the website to the terseness of the syntax. Before you take offense, I say this as a member of that generation. These days if you have an ugly website, and opaque syntax, you're considered to be an abandoned project. Agree with it or not, your website sends a signal to the user and MacPort's signal says "it'l…

There's nothing wrong with the website though. Ugly is highly subjective

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#222
post #196
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a package manager need to track their users at all? If you want usage statistics for packages just track how often individual packages are downloaded on the server side. A maintainer has no need to know who's installing what.

This discussion on GitHub reveals the mindset of the Homebrew people: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/6745

The Homebrew folks think this is a non-problem. You may agree or disagree, but the pull request is certainly a non-solution to this maybe-problem. Not just because it gained zero traction and did not get merged anywhere, but also because it's just an obscure band-aid. Either opt-out anonymous telemetry is a good idea, or it's a problem. If to you it's a problem, advocate for its removal in its entirety.

So even if I have an issue with telemetry, good on the Homebrew maintainers for ignoring this MR.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#223
post #98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they want to include the most common packages in their unit tests, or understand usage patterns so they can prioritize development? It’s very hard to write and maintain good software without knowing how it’s used. No package manager needs to know how you specifically use it, but aggregate data and the ability to identify scenarios it does not handle well are both very important for SW lifecycle.

It's 2023. Hard drive space shouldn't be an issue. Test installing the full software suite, make it work, and you know the lesser installs will all work.

> Test installing the full software suite, make it work

Are you paying for the compute?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would you be willing to pay so that Homebrew can maintain a large amount of hardware covering nearly all configurations?

Just checked their OpenCollective, and they seem to have about US$100k there: https://opencollective.com/homebrew#category-BUDGET They seem to be receiving about US$2k/month via Patreon too: https://www.patreon.com/homebrew I think their Patreon was around the same when I looked ~12 months ago.

$2k/mo is a terribly low figure for a piece of software that nearly every dev on macOS uses.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#225
post #77
post #44

Reminder that nothing in Homebrew has any signing or attempt at supply chain integrity. Now that they are moving away from clients using git, so even git commit signing is off the table now. When you install brew you are giving hundreds of people (or anyone who has access to their Github accounts) full remote code execution on your machine. Never ever use brew on a machine you use to access production.

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?

With Homebrew, frankly. That's the Mac equivalent to apt. I've also had success with Anaconda (specifically, miniconda / miniforge) - it's not just for Python! It's great for creating disposable development environments (i.e., I need HDF5, but only for this project).

Other than that, your toolchain is what Apple gives you, and upgrades in ~parity with XCode.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does a package manager need to track their users at all? Do any of you actually work in this industry shipping software products to end users? Without telemetry the problem there is literally one of trying to read the mind of your end users to figure out what they're doing, hoping that your internal CI manages to reflect the configuration in their environment.

Any actual arguments? I don't see why something that's little more than a file server needs telemetry.

Have you looked at the analytics yet? Or are you only speaking from ideological priors?

The most valuable one I’d guess is package install error rates. Seems pretty useful to me.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#227
post #67

As 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…

Do I still have to reinstall Macports every time I upgrade MacOS?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#228
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacPorts makes no effort to not look abandoned. It's very much 'the old way' of doing things from the look of the website to the terseness of the syntax. Before you take offense, I say this as a member of that generation. These days if you have an ugly website, and opaque syntax, you're considered to be an abandoned project. Agree with it or not, your website sends a signal to the user and MacPort's signal says "it'l…

There's nothing wrong with the website though. Ugly is highly subjective

What are the odds that an Apple user finds that site attractive? I come from the linux world, so fine by me, but I'm no dummy, this site looks like it's going to tell me it runs better in a modern browser like IE6.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

macOS also has .pkg installer packages that are native. The only issue is that there is no uninstall functionality built in to them unless the package provides their own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installer_(macOS)

That actually bugged me so much that I made a script to use the manifest to blow away declared files and dirs

    PKGID="${1:-}"

    PKG_ROOT="$(pkgutil --pkg-info "$PKGID" \
        | awk -F: '/location:/{print $2}' \
        | sed -e 's,^[ \t]*,/,')"
    
    pkgutil --only-files --files "$PKGID" \
        | join_paths_0 "$PKG_ROOT" \
        | xargs -0 $dry_run rm -v
    pkgutil --only-dirs --files "$PKGID" \
        | sort -r \
        | join_paths_0 "$PKG_ROOT" \
        | xargs -0 $dry_run rmdir
    pkgutil --forget "$PKGID"
It still leaves detritus, but is better than "oh well, guess I'm stuck with Rando Thing 0.9beta forever"

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does a package manager need to track their users at all? Do any of you actually work in this industry shipping software products to end users? Without telemetry the problem there is literally one of trying to read the mind of your end users to figure out what they're doing, hoping that your internal CI manages to reflect the configuration in their environment.

I think HN has a very varied audience - some work in the industry, others want A/B testing to be made illegal on the grounds that it is non-consensual mind-control experimentation :P

I am in both groups. I work in the industry and I am so tired of colleagues wanting to grab or data they can get their grubby hands on and then barely use it at all for anything useful. So many companies collect data just in case.
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