I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
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I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
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Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#2Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew.
If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#3> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system.
Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage.
What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#4Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew. If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.
Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for.
I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process.
I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#5> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#6> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insu…
I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insu…
I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.
Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#8> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
It's been five years for my data point, but every single time it came time to update brew, I hit something else I'd never seen before. Every time, it broke.
And from what I can see, migrations are still causing issues. [0]
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#9>The macOS package management story is not great.
Ummm... Homebrew has been around for at least a decade.
Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
#10> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
The one issue I had was creating a new admin user for a client project (so I can just package everything created for that client neatly) and then immediately run into permissions issue. After that, I installed macports and never looked back (other than checking formula for installation guidance for some package).