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Homebrew Is Awesome

danthesalmon.com

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Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#31

Post by mid-kid »

mort96 wrote: post #16
jez wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the default Homebrew install location moved to /opt/homebrew on new Apple Silicon Macs. (I don’t know why Intel Macs still use /usr/local.) In any case, it’s possible to choose a custom installation location, even on Intel Macs if you prefer. https://docs.brew.sh/Installation Further discussion on the decision: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9177

/opt/homebrew isn't a folder provided by the operating the system, but it's still a "system folder" as in not a user folder. That's messed up. I have to imagine that this causes no end of issues on multi-user machines. The homebrew folder should either be somewhere under ~, or owned by root or some other system account.

Most compiled software gets its installation prefix hardcoded at build time. If you move the directory elsewhere, then everything needs to be recompiled.

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#32

Post by dengolius »

Homebrew is a horrible thing for user who is not familiar with ruby syntax. Community do not have any user friendly how-to guides for developing new Formulae as well as weird tests like to long description or to long line.

For example I have a mono repository which contain Makefile and can produce one or six different executable tools. Four of these six tools are CLI utilities but the other three should work as a service. The problem I have encountered is the lack of documentation or an example of how to write auto-tests for daemons and for utilities in one formula because some of them require a working database from another Formula or in the root of the system. That is, it is very difficult to write such auto-tests, which would check workability, and really it was possible to run them when building the formula.

Yes, the workaround is to make own repository with Homebrew Tap but better to have it in main repository when users could setup software without any additional action.

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#33

Post by pseufaux »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #5

As someone who has been working on Homebrew for 14 years: it’s nice to see something positive about Homebrew on the front-page for a change. Homebrew is far from perfect or the best package manager but it is still surprising to me how much the Hacker News crowd likes to hate on something so ubiquitous with no meaningful corporate backing run by volunteers mostly in their spare time.

On the advice of numerous HN threads, I switched from Homebrew to Nix, and gave it a 6 month shot. Nix was great at first: simple, fast, elegant. However, I quickly realized that the simplicity was a facade that even a casual user would eventually be forced to remove. And what you find behind the facade gets really, complex really quickly.

What I appreciate about Homebrew is that in years of using it, I have never felt the need to dive deeply into its inner workings. For the most part, it just works. I can access the utilities I need to do my work and reliably keep them updated. Homebrew has its problems for sure, but the tooling has improved immensely over the recent years. So thank you for your work!!!

Also side note, I just recently discovered the brew bundle command's --global flag. It basically let's you use a declarative format globally installed taps, formula, casks, and vscode extensions. I can add the .Brewfile to my dotfiles repo to sync across machines. Though, it's not really what the bundle command is meant for, it sure beats manually copying down and installing the list of formula.

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#34

Post by Affric »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #5

As someone who has been working on Homebrew for 14 years: it’s nice to see something positive about Homebrew on the front-page for a change. Homebrew is far from perfect or the best package manager but it is still surprising to me how much the Hacker News crowd likes to hate on something so ubiquitous with no meaningful corporate backing run by volunteers mostly in their spare time.

Mike, thanks for homebrew and thanks for being so active in this thread.

Homebrew is a great project and has been an incredible help for me.

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#35

Post by Alifatisk »

Been using Homebrew since 2015, I’ve seen negative comments about it. While some of them are true, I still love homebrew because how well it works out of the box.

But If I know I am going to install multiple versions of a program ahead of time, I use asdf-vm instead

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#36

Post by salmon »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #5

As someone who has been working on Homebrew for 14 years: it’s nice to see something positive about Homebrew on the front-page for a change. Homebrew is far from perfect or the best package manager but it is still surprising to me how much the Hacker News crowd likes to hate on something so ubiquitous with no meaningful corporate backing run by volunteers mostly in their spare time.

Author here - thanks for everything you do to make Homebrew awesome!

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#37

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

dengolius wrote: post #32

Homebrew is a horrible thing for user who is not familiar with ruby syntax. Community do not have any user friendly how-to guides for developing new Formulae as well as weird tests like to long description or to long line. For example I have a mono repository which contain Makefile and can produce one or six different executable tools. Four of these six tools are CLI utilities but the other three should work as a ser…

I was like what? I’m not very familiar with ruby syntax and I’ve been a mostly happy user for years. But then I realized by user you meant someone who creates formulae, not someone who just uses it to install and manage packages

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#38

Post by FireBeyond »

50 wrote: post #28
BigJ1211 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the overal negative sentiment as well. As someone who's been using homebrew since I think 2012, I've enjoyed using it a lot with only some rare issues. So overal it's been a great experience. I've never done a dive into package managers and just used what's been available. So even though homebrew is slower than other package managers, it has also rarely thrown me for a loop.

> I've never done a dive into package managers and just used what's been available. See the Nix Package Manager[1]. 1. https://checkoway.net/musings/nix/

I'm someone who very much loves the concept of Nix and what it is trying to achieve. However, a sibling poster put it well:

> On the advice of numerous HN threads, I switched from Homebrew to Nix, and gave it a 6 month shot. Nix was great at first: simple, fast, elegant. However, I quickly realized that the simplicity was a facade that even a casual user would eventually be forced to remove. And what you find behind the facade gets really, complex really quickly.

Re: Homebrew Is Awesome

#39

Post by ripley12 »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #5

As someone who has been working on Homebrew for 14 years: it’s nice to see something positive about Homebrew on the front-page for a change. Homebrew is far from perfect or the best package manager but it is still surprising to me how much the Hacker News crowd likes to hate on something so ubiquitous with no meaningful corporate backing run by volunteers mostly in their spare time.

I love Homebrew. I find it especially useful on Linux, where it lets me avoid all the pain of distro-specific packaging.
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