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Homebrew 1.4.0
- iRobbery 9y agoOh nice, just upgraded everything yesterday. Side note: I find it a pity brew upgrade webcalls google analytics.
- mmastrac 9y agoYou can disable it if you aren't comfortable with it (they document this clearly multiple places). analytics (on|off) Turn on/off Homebrew's analytics.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoI've been using brew for years and wasn't aware that it was using google analytics at all. It may be clearly documented, but they're not doing much to ensure users know about it.
- sigzero 9y agoIf it is clearly documented that should be it. Maybe a blurb on the main page about it would be nice but not necessary.
- ysavir 9y agoAny opt-out features should be disclosed to the user on install. That seems fairly straight forward to me.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoWhich, as someone pointed out in a separate comment thread here, Homebrew is already doing. I'm not sure what else you want from them, they seem to be following best practices here.
- falcolas 9y agoExisting installs were not prompted. You had to catch it in the patch notes, IIRC.
- mikemcquaid 9y agoNot prompted but were notified.
- bobwaycott 9y agoThe notification when it first came out wasn’t really noticeable for a tool that frequently has a lot of output an average user running `brew upgrade` would be used to ignoring. Prompting would have been the better choice. I didn’t notice until the change hit HN and created a bit of a shit storm. PS: Despite my feelings of disagreement on how brew handled this, I still appreciate your work.
- mikemcquaid 9y agoHomebrew literally never prompts for anything so a prompt would likely break many scripts.
- ysavir 9y agoYou are right. If I put more thought into my comment I would have urged them to prompt the user. But I rushed, and the post was invalid and senseless.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoI feel that if you're collecting data about me and sending it to a third party, there should at least be a clear notice during installation. It should really be opt-in, but at the very least it should be as obvious as they would make it if it were opt-in.
- mikemcquaid 9y agoThere is a clear notice during installation.
- k_sh 9y agoIIRC, it's mentioned when you install brew
- daveFNbuck 9y agoI never noticed it. A lot of text scrolls across the screen during the installation.
- softawre 9y agowhat do you want them to do?
- bobwaycott 9y agoAt first install, prompt the user to opt-in? Occasionally re-prompt a user, say, once per year to choose to opt-out if they’re opted in, just to check they’re still cool with it and haven’t forgotten and/or changed their mind on how comfortable they are with the practice? People’s opinions on that sort of thing don’t always remain static.
- joemi 9y agoOpt-in is a decent enough method. But "Occasionally re-prompt a user" is a horrible idea, in my opinion. From a user perspective, that's kind of like the software forgetting the options you set. The very first time that something re-prompted me about something I had already opted-in to or out of, I would feel intense rage that it's asking me something that it had already asked me.
- bobwaycott 9y agoYou would feel intense rage? Jesus. That sounds like intense overkill. You might be quite unlike an average person if you specifically--and without fail--recall every choice you've made forever when you're in the process of setting up tools. No, it's not at all like the software forgetting the options you've set. It's the software, in the interest of providing a user with the greatest possible control over their software, while having the average user's propensity to forget minor details in mind, offering the explicit option to re-evaluate a prior choice in the future without having to remember to do so, or manually recall the way to do it. Moreover, when I threw out the off-the-cuff idea to occasionally re-prompt, I set that occasion as an annual one. You're making it sound in this overreaction as if I suggested it to occur every few days or weeks. Instead of instantly going to such unwarranted extremes as full-on-intense-rage-mode-11, thinking to yourself, "Oh my fucking god, what the fuck is wrong with this developer that s/he'd dare to ask me this question I answered 2 years ago again?!", you might pause just a moment to consider it to be a little like recalibrating a tool that's been in use for some time. Few people keep static positions on things. Such recalibration doesn't need to occur at every minor upgrade, but perhaps major upgrades might want to ask the user to review their settings/choices. I've changed my position on things I've opted in/out of at various times. When it's privacy-related, I've increasingly developed a harder default stance over the last 15 years. I wouldn't mind if my tools asked me to annually review old choices I've long forgotten--much like I've heard Facebook offers people their little privacy checkups (ignoring for the moment the efficacy of such a checkup when everything you do is tracked). Many people other than me reacted to the way in which the analytics "feature" was included in homebrew with surprise, because many of us never noticed the notification, and a great many of us believe tracking is something that should always be opt-in, not opt-out. However, as of this writing, I can't recall exactly what my current homebrew setting for analytics is, and I can't recall how long it's been since I last checked it to ensure it is what I think it is. But hey, that's just me, friend. I can't remember every choice I made last month, much less last year, two years ago, or any time before that. If you do, that's cool. If you were using a tool I created/maintained, and I wanted to cover all my bases, I'd simply give you a way to say, "Don't ever fucking ask me this question again or I'll rage tweet what a forgetful little shit you are." :)
- jdmnd 9y agoThere was an announcement[0] a couple of years ago that certainly provoked a lot of debate on HN[1]. [0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720
- daveFNbuck 9y agoI guess I didn't happen to check HN that day :(
- vsl 9y agoIt told you on cli after you updated.
- hamandcheese 9y agoIf you are a user who cares about such things, I think the onus lies on you.
- jancsika 9y agoThat would turn it off for package downloads, but not for the initial install, right?
- dom96 9y agoOut of curiosity, would you be more comfortable if brew webcalled a different service? one not affiliated with Google?
- iRobbery 9y agoWell different, i would prefer it would make only calls to services that are required for what the application does, so sites' project i guess is okay, but certainly not third parties. And then certainly not any big data third parties. I'm quite sure, there are download stats for the brew application itself to monitor usage and so on. Though i had the option to block it, using little snitch (great app, not affiliated). For web browsing i have it on never allow already, but not for all applications i use from terminal, so the little snitch, snitched about it.
- mikemcquaid 9y agoWe do not have the resources to be able to host something like this ourselves or we would have done so.
- leadingthenet 9y agoNot sure about him, but I personally would, yes.
- drinchev 9y agoThe Patreon page says they receive $177 per month. That's too low for a project with such a high popularity and usage. I read somewhere ( and I bet ) it's used by Google / Facebook / Apple employees.
- blackRust 9y agoIf you look into the OS version analytics, there are 397 events registered from "macOS (10.14)". That's the next version of macOS :) https://brew.sh/analytics/os-version/ https://brew.sh/analytics/os-version/
- avprpl 9y agonice catch!
- spiralganglion 9y agoMy immediate thought is that this is spoofed. I doubt anyone at Apple would be silly enough to allow software on an unannounced OS to freely send out analytic data. I expect they'd have some sort of filtering applied either right on their dev/test machines (something like Little Snitch, though surely built in-house) or at the network level.
- bradgessler 9y agoI also doubt they’d ever release a security vulnerability where a user can enter a blank password to gain root access to macOS. :-P
- reaperducer 9y ago> I doubt anyone at Apple would be silly enough to allow software on an unannounced OS to freely send out analytic data ...and you'd be wrong. It is very common for Apple to test its new browser versions on the public internet and for those version numbers to show up in the logs of popular Apple web sites. It's one of the ways that Think Secret could confirm that a new version was on the way.
- 2bitencryption 9y agodoes homebrew still* use Github as the store for all packages? Just curious, that always seemed like a strange scenario. * or am I wrong that it ever did?
- jameskilton 9y ago"Packages" in homebrew are nothing more than Ruby install files called Formulas[1]. So using Github works really well for their use case and I don't think there is any thought of changing it. Updating homebrew, new formulas, etc, is nothing more than a `git pull`. [1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/tree/master/Formula https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/tree/master/Formul...
- FooBarWidget 9y agoNot quite. They also supply precompiled binaries nowadays, one version of each supported macOS version. They have a CI infrastructure that continuously builds precompiled binaries for all formulas, for all supported macOS versions.
- jameskilton 9y agoRight, those binaries are hosted in Bintray (http://homebrew.bintray.com/ http://homebrew.bintray.com/)
- diggan 9y agoIs there any facilities for mirroring this or this "belongs" to bintray? Torrents, magnet links, rsync server or something like that. You would think `wget` for building your own mirror would work fine but no, http://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/ http://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/ returns "Forbidden", probably because the directory listing is too large.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoThere is an environment variable you can set to force building from source if you do not want to rely on bottled binaries.
- anabala 9y agoFWIW I recently installed Ubuntu on a macbook. Runs so much faster now, longer battery life etc etc
- philip1209 9y agoThe maintainer's tweet about interviewing at Google is one of my favorites: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...
- ubernostrum 9y agoOne of my less-favorite things is how many people always pop up to defend the Google approach and argue that if he couldn't pass such an interview he must by definition not be qualified.
- tc7 9y agoPossible points for the defense: - He may be qualified to work at Google, but that's not apparent just because he created Homebrew, right? - Google can afford to be picky enough to miss out on popular open-source project authors who _can't_ code on the whiteboard in favor of those who _can_ -- can we argue that they should reverse this, or just that in certain cases potentially-qualified people fall through the cracks?
- trowawee 9y agoI get that the response to this will be "they make $INFINITY as-is", but yes, I'd be willing to argue that they should reverse that. My basic argument would look something like: A) Writing algos on a whiteboard is not the be-all end-all of actual programming B) The skill set of "can identify things that people want and need and actually implement them" is a useful one that the person who created one of the most widely used pieces of OSS out there has demonstrated they have. C) There's no evidence that I know of that indicates that whiteboard algo writing correlates with the skill set identified in B, and a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests they aren't correlated. (And there are a range of other skills that are useful for an engineer or someone leading teams of engineers that are similarly not correlated with whiteboard algo writing.) D) Firms benefit from diversity. Gender-diverse and ethnically-diverse companies are more likely to out-perform less diverse companies.[1] I don't have specific evidence for it, but I suspect that a firm that has a hiring process that brings in people with multiple diverse skill sets will eventually perform better than a firm that only brings in employees with tightly focused, highly similar skill sets. And to respond to the "well, FB/Amazon/Google make $INFINITY as-is, so nyah-nyah", I would say that those companies are in market-dominant positions now that may make their math on hiring a diverse array of skill sets different from a theoretical firm, but I also suspect that maintaining those dominant positions will be more difficult with an engineering corps that is solely selected on a narrow band of proficiencies. So, I'm not necessarily saying that Google should change their policy (although I do feel comfortable saying that any company that isn't in that rarified air that decides to copy that policy is making a serious mistake), but I think there's a pretty solid case for why they should at least acknowledge that there are people for whom they should make exceptions and possibly completely reverse that policy and overhaul their hiring process to achieve a broader range of skills among their engineers. [1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...
- bluedino 9y agoDoes anyone use MacPorts/Fink anymore? What are the use cases for them?
- ketralnis 9y agoI use MacPorts pretty heavily and prefer it over homebrew. The use-case is the same as for homebrew
- bluedino 9y agoI meant, what do you prefer about one vs the other
- brorfred 9y agoI use both homebrew and macports. The main benefit with macports for me is the ability to work with different versions at the same time. You can have applications requiring gcc4.5, gcc4.9, and gcc6 installed. The package manager handles most weird special cases and combinations.
- ketralnis 9y agoI don't know what to tell you, I like it better. Different flavours for different folks. I never know what to make of "people still use ______?!" comments
- rockostrich 9y agoIs there no specific reason why you like it better? Usually you can explain why certain software is preferable to similar software. For example, I use IntelliJ over VS Code for writing Scala because I've had difficulties getting the Ensime extensions to work properly and IntelliJ usually just works. I use VS Code over PyCharm for writing Python code because it's lighter weight and offers 99% of the features that I need. We use Slack at work instead of IRC because there are a lot of non-technical people who need to communicate with the dev team and Slack offers an easy to use UI for organizations.
- jlillyreed 9y agoJust curious, where can I find their reasoning for removing apache & php from brew? Is it because they come pre-installed on macs?
- chipotle_coyote 9y agoThey're removing those taps, but that's because they're migrating the formulas to homebrew core. Do a "brew update" and "brew search apache" and you can see they're all there, but now as just, e,g, "apache-httpd" rather than "homebrew/apache/apache-httpd". I assume the same is going to happen with PHP.
- dordoka 9y agoI reckon they have not been removed from homebrew, just relocated. For example, apache has been moved to homebrew-core. You can see that in the archived repository: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-apache https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-apache
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- snitzr 9y agoHow does one upgrade?
- sigzero 9y agobrew update
- AlexeyBrin 9y agobrew update brew upgrade
- danra 9y agoThe first-time installation on Mac OS X 10.5 has been improved This is just pleasant to see. Some people like/are stuck using older OSes. Which Apple itself conveniently ignores (inconveniently for its developers), e.g., Xcode hacks and looking for 3rd party copies of old SDKs to be able to keep compiling for older OSes. :(
- mikemcquaid 9y agoFun fact: for maximum compatibility our vendored portable Ruby 2.3.3 was compiled on 10.5 (hence these fixes).
- orbitur 9y agoWhile it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous. What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?
- danra 9y ago10.6 is still used by a lot of people on Intel processors, and compiling for it on a modern platform involves the hacks I mentioned.
- kelnos 9y agoAny ideas why, though? I can understand not wanting to be on the latest-shiny until the inevitable initial bugs are fixed... but does Apple even provide security updates for 10.6?
- huwinfa 9y agoExcellent
- eridius 9y ago> Homebrew requires the CLT on all but the latest version of macOS (to avoid copious workarounds in formulae) Why? What are these workarounds? The linked PR didn't explain, and as someone who's still got one machine on 10.12 I'd really rather not have to keep CLT installed as well. Edit: Wow, the maintainer on that PR is a real jerk. He refused to answer a legitimate question (and locked the PR at the same time) because he thought the original (since edited) complaint of "The error message for this patch is terrible" was "rude". MikeMcQuaid, if you ever read this, this sort of behavior on your part is a great argument for ditching HomeBrew.
- felixgallo 9y agoGood luck writing your own version and supporting it. Be sure to post your progress.
- ManuelKiessling 9y agoI wish I could click this upvote triangle a million times.
- lloeki 9y agoOr you could, like, do it. Things are easier these days with great CI tools, cloud stuff like CDNs, cheap storage and bandwidth, and FOSS sponsors. Scratching your own itch is something that can be worth being done at times. After all that's how Homebrew started, when people grew discontent of the complexity of MacPorts and Fink. There were dismissing words towards Homebrew back then too (like "wait till they have to do X").
- yazmeya 9y agoThe implication is that having commit rights on a highly visible and popular open-source project somehow absolves the maintainer of the need for patience and civility. I would expect quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.
- eridius 9y agoWhy would I write my own version? If I ditch Homebrew I'd just go back to MacPorts.
- TY 9y agoTo the conversation of making it easier for enterprises to support open source projects. Would it make sense to create a legal entity whose only goal would be to "sell" enterprise subscriptions to open source products and then channel all the funds to those projects, after taking a reasonable cut for administrative expenses - such as invoicing, collection, production of physical media when required and etc? That would make support of open source projects fit much easier into standard enterprise procurement process. Each project would define different levels of subscription with different price tags. Token licenses would be generated and physical media created and mailed out. Pretty sure something like this was already discussed on HN?
- tzs 9y agoEdit: Wow...within 20 seconds of me posting this, an update to "Command Line Tools" version 9.2 showed up in the App Store app. So, if you have this problem, check updates again. Anyone else getting a warning about command line tools? $ brew doctor tells me: Warning: A newer Command Line Tools release is available. Update them from Software Update in the App Store. Looking around, I see that there are two sets of the command line tools installed. There is a set in /Library/Devloper/CommandLineTools/usr/bin and a set in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin The latter is what /usr/bin/clang invokes. The /Library/Developer set is older. The file date on clang is 2017-10-20 on that one, and 2017-11-17 on the one under XCode.app. Homebrew checks the command line tools version by running "clang --version". It uses this one: /Library/Devloper/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/clang It has the /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools prefix hard coded. The version I have there is 900.0.38. The version under Xcode.app is 900.0.39.2 (which is the version Homebrew wants). Looking back at my Time Machine backups, I see that /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr did not even have a bin directory until 2017-11-23 (it just had usr/share/man). The bin directory there, and its contents, were apparently created when I installed "Command Line Tools (macOS High Sierra Version 10.13) for Xcode" version 9.1 from the App Store on 2017-11-22. That had clang version 900.0.38. That is also the version that was under Xcode.app at the time. It looks like on 2017-12-06 there was an Xcode update (version 9.2) that updated the command line tools under Xcode.app bringing the clang version to 900.0.39.2 (which is the one Homebrew wants). I haven't seen any updates for the "Command Line Tools" package, so what is the correct way to get the 900.0.39.2 tools into /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin, where Homebrew expect to find them? Is Apple just being slow to get the update out?
- 0x0 9y agoI got the same warning, opened Appstore.app and found a pending update for the Command Line Tools that wasn't there earlier today.
- dunein 9y agoAwesome! At some point I would like to get into Homebrew development (I'm already familiar with Ruby).
- mikemcquaid 9y agoWe'd love that! Here's a good starting point and feel free to contact me directly if you'd like other pointers.