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Homebrew has always been a hacky abomination. I get that it has made life easier for many people, but MacPorts is so much better. It's basically apt for Macs.

Homebrew has always been a hacky abomination. I get that it has made life easier for many people, but MacPorts is so much better. It's basically apt for Macs. Homebrew used to unilaterally take over /usr/local, and do all sorts of unconventional things. A few years ago it started playing nicer, but at its core, it's eschewing time-honored conventions across the board. One of the biggest things about Homebrew that is annoying is that it tries to reuse the stock MacOS libraries to avoid installing dependencies. So you end up with things built against ancient broken regex libs, etc. MacPorts takes longer to install because it does things right. After you install all the MacPorts GNU libraries and utilities, you have a real Unix system that closely resembles Linux, which is what all the development tools expect. Linux won the Unix war decades ago, whether anyone likes it or not. MacOS's BSD heritage is still causing pain for people today, especially since the core libraries are literally a decade out of date.

fouc 6y ago
I've been a long time user of homebrew but lately I've been getting ticked off with the design choices its made. In particular it will update things and break perfectly fine apps, and then make it hard to revert or downgrade. I should look into macports or nix or one of the bsd package managers.
- ilikepi 6y ago
  Same. Long ago, I finally got fed up with MacPorts when it insisted on building an entire Perl distribution as a dependency of a package I asked it to install. I found Homebrew, and I was very happy to learn that it offered a way install the same package with an optional flag that disabled the Perl dependency. It reminded me of Portage, the powerful package manager from Gentoo, so I migrated from MacPorts to Homebrew. I happily ran it out of ~/usr/brew for years, which allowed me to trivially clone my entire installation and experiment with potentially destructive operations like major database upgrades. As Homebrew became more popular, it got more opinionated. The system that supports optional flags is effectively (if not officially) deprecated, and running it outside of /usr/local is unsupported. I recently tried to install a fresh Homebrew in a different custom location (/opt/brew). Many packages require building from source in this scenario, but I accepted that trade-off. I even begrudgingly accepting building an entire Python distribution as a dependency, because I really wanted everything to live under /opt/brew. But no matter what I tried, I could not get any of the modern postgresql packages to build. I burned several multi-hour sessions trying different versions of XCode CLT and alternate build flags. I really wanted to inquire how the maintainers actually manage to build the binary packages in the first place, but my impression from reading Github issues and mailing list posts is that I'd basically be told I was running an unsupported configuration, and that my only recourse would be to create my own formula and run it from a tap. But that finally was a bridge too far (been there done that), so I just gave up and let it make its mess in /usr/local. I do think I understand why Homebrew has evolved this way. They are trying to support a huge userbase, and they're also subject to Apple's whims with regards to their development tools[1]. It's a massive project every year when new versions of macOS and XCode are released. They have to set limits to keep their sanity. It's just a bummer that I'm considering migrating again... [1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/4334#issuecomment-402917616 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/4334#issuecomment-4029... EDIT: remove unnecessary bits; add forgotten link

fouc 6y ago

I've been a long time user of homebrew but lately I've been getting ticked off with the design choices its made. In particular it will update things and break perfectly fine apps, and then make it hard to revert or downgrade. I should look into macports or nix or one of the bsd package managers.

ilikepi 6y ago
Same. Long ago, I finally got fed up with MacPorts when it insisted on building an entire Perl distribution as a dependency of a package I asked it to install. I found Homebrew, and I was very happy to learn that it offered a way install the same package with an optional flag that disabled the Perl dependency. It reminded me of Portage, the powerful package manager from Gentoo, so I migrated from MacPorts to Homebrew. I happily ran it out of ~/usr/brew for years, which allowed me to trivially clone my entire installation and experiment with potentially destructive operations like major database upgrades. As Homebrew became more popular, it got more opinionated. The system that supports optional flags is effectively (if not officially) deprecated, and running it outside of /usr/local is unsupported. I recently tried to install a fresh Homebrew in a different custom location (/opt/brew). Many packages require building from source in this scenario, but I accepted that trade-off. I even begrudgingly accepting building an entire Python distribution as a dependency, because I really wanted everything to live under /opt/brew. But no matter what I tried, I could not get any of the modern postgresql packages to build. I burned several multi-hour sessions trying different versions of XCode CLT and alternate build flags. I really wanted to inquire how the maintainers actually manage to build the binary packages in the first place, but my impression from reading Github issues and mailing list posts is that I'd basically be told I was running an unsupported configuration, and that my only recourse would be to create my own formula and run it from a tap. But that finally was a bridge too far (been there done that), so I just gave up and let it make its mess in /usr/local. I do think I understand why Homebrew has evolved this way. They are trying to support a huge userbase, and they're also subject to Apple's whims with regards to their development tools[1]. It's a massive project every year when new versions of macOS and XCode are released. They have to set limits to keep their sanity. It's just a bummer that I'm considering migrating again... [1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/4334#issuecomment-402917616 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/4334#issuecomment-4029... EDIT: remove unnecessary bits; add forgotten link