20 ms·

>They just aren't written in hipster languages and they don't force you to compile every fucking thing you want to use on every fucking machine every fucking ti

• derefr 11y ago
  And, in fact, so does the FreeBSD ports system it was based on. In both cases, though, the important point is that the binary is effectively a cached compilation artifact of what your computer would (hopefully) generate on its own in the default case. This means the whole workflow of package-building is still there even for binary packages; you can ask the package manager to install a package with alternate ./configure options, at which point it'll realize it has no available cached artifact for that particular configuration and build it from source instead. Honestly, after using Homebrew for a while, I find regular Linux package managers kind of naive, more like mail-order parts catalogues than a true system configuration tool. Having to consume Nginx from a PPA just to get ngx_lua support, for example: it should be as simple as an optional dependency on luajit which is enabled by an install-time "--with-lua" flag to the package manager, causing the package to be built differently.