Live data from Hacker News

Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

github.com

81–90 of 311 posts

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#82
post #26

Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew. Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo. Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json A…

Perhaps you could embed something like https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke to run the Ruby scripts for compatibility.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#83
post #26

Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew. Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo. Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json A…

Perhaps you could embed something like https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke to run the Ruby scripts for compatibility.

Please don't.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#85
post #76

Homebrew sure has room for improvement, as most software does, and I appreciate every effort to replace and renew what we have with something better. But my own grievances with Homebrew isn't with the codebase itself. What discourages me from using Homebrew is the intent and the mindset of its developers and packagers, who, I think, see their goal building an "unstable" distribution, as Debian defines it: "[a distrib…

If I understand correctly, running a Debian-style stable repo would essentially require forking all distributed software and backporting security fixes to them.

With many macOS users coming from a different communities than Debian users, I really wonder how well that would go over with the folks whose software was being distributed.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#86

With my Homebrew hat on, but not speaking for others: I think this is pretty cool, and demonstrates something that we've discussed indirectly for years. At its core, there are really two parts to Homebrew: 1. There's the client side, i.e. `brew`, which 99.9% of users stick to happy paths (bottle installs, supported platforms) within. These users could be supported with relative ease by a small native-code installer,…

> but parallel downloads of things like bottles and DMGs is not an architectural limitation of Homebrew itself, but instead a conscious decision to trade some install speed for courtesy towards the services we fetch from

That doesn't make sense. As you say you're directing a huge volume of traffic so it makes no difference exactly when a user downloads a byte. It all gets smeared out. Only the total amount of data matters and that is unaffected by parallelism.

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#87
post #26

Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew. Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo. Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json A…

Perhaps you could embed something like https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke to run the Ruby scripts for compatibility.

Looked at that. I do not really think implementing something like artichoke or rutie would be a good idea. I do not want my project to become overly bloated and to achieve my real goal of a declarative system management thing I think sticking to bottles (that cover almost all formulae thanks to the amazing homebrew community) and casks, getting those to work 100% is the better approach. Thank you for the suggestion though!

Re: Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

#90
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you interested in a rust implementation of brew? I'm guessing it's that you hoping that it is eventually more performant -- are there specific areas of current brew you have identified as performance bottlenecks likely to eventually benefit from a rust implementation? Or any more info to share about assumptions/hopes that motivated this or any other motivations?

Building from source, obviously, will never be really that much more performant as it mainly relies on the underlying build systems and things like ninja, cmake, cargo etc. are usually optimized very very well. Thanks to rust just being (slightly, significantly? no idea about ruby's speed) faster + concurrent downloading & pouring of bottles, most "regular" formula installs feel a good bit faster than brew already. M…

I would be interested to see more declarative package managers for macOS, I was looking for something similar just a few days ago.
Post reply on HN