5 ms·

> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux

by __jem 5y ago

> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.

jpgvm 5y ago
Agree as a Mac user. I miss pacman from Arch. Now -that- is a nice package manager. It took the best (simple) parts from Gentoo and combined them with the better parts of apt/rpm/zypp etc.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I always found pacman a little weird to use, but I think that was more a function of its UI -- its commands and options just weren't easily memorable for me, and I had to look them up almost every time. Its actual functionality was great, though.
- lloeki 5y ago
  So WDYT of this? https://www.archmac.org/ https://www.archmac.org/ (But please read this) https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.html https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.htm...
irateswami 5y ago
Homebrew is more transparent and approachable, I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt. Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version of whatever software packages I'm trying to install. I end up just having to adding various libraries and repos to my sources list to get the version I need, or go to an outside dependency manager like gvm, sdkman, etc which is basically homebrew anyway. Homebrew is for devs that need to get shit done, apt is for computer scientists that love the tool more than solving problems with a tool. For the record, I'm on both linux and mac and there's plenty of upside and downside to both.
- regularfry 5y ago
  More accurate to say that apt is for the sysadmin, perhaps.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  You're extrapolating from Debian's packaging concept to other distros, though your argument does not apply to most of the rolling distros out there. On a rolling distro (e.g. using pacman, or say yast2 and others for sake of argument) you typically ship the header files included with the libraries, so that you don't need multiple versions of the same library installed. On Debian/Ubuntu, however, it will always end up with that mess of dozens of versions of the same library because all PPAs are somewhat outdated and used different versions of specific libraries once they were published.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    That's the problem isn't it? Whichever problem you point at in Linux, the answer is invariably the same: "you're holding it wr^W^W^^W you're using the wrong distro, the wrong package manager, the wrong DE, the wrong version of any of those things". And, invariably, for any problem the one true combination is different.
    - mixedCase 5y ago
      And that's why forks suck and everyone should use a spork. Having options that cater to different usecases is confusing. You don't really need to take big bites anyway.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        - Hey, your fork is broken, and made out of plastic. - You should use the oak box set of Forkuntu 12.4, no problems with forks there. - Yes, but it lacks any spoons - For spoons there's always Spoontoo. - But... I want both spoons and forks... - For that you can always tweak a few dozen unrelated work orders, menus and item descriptions in Sporkian. But that will only work witn Sporkian unstable, and needs a special tablecloth. - Okay... What about knives?
moshmosh 5y ago
Homebrew's very up to date, without that cutting-edge quality risking system stability (since that's totally separate) and has an incredible number of supported packages, including tons of closed-source stuff, out of the box. No hunting down PPAs or obscure unofficial back-port packages or anything. The only Linux package managers I've seen even approach it (not match, but approach) are from bleeding-edge distros like Arch or Gentoo, but those come at a harsh stability cost since they also manage the rest of your system, including all the shared libs (ugh) and system-level packages (I gather that's the case on Arch, it sure was on Gentoo when I used it for many years, mostly because I loved Portage and OpenRC)
- sagarm 5y ago
  Some of this is a matter of taste, clearly. I strongly prefer having my system packages being rock solid; I can always fetch updated software for the very few cases where I want that. However, my aversion to homebrew goes beyond taste: my experience with homebrew is rife with breakages. To be fair we were trying to use it in a CI system, which will very quickly reveal a buggy system. By contrast, apt/dnf are rock solid when used in CI. An actual example: we tried providing our own recipe to install a particular version of libicu. This triggered an upgrade of some dependency; that triggered an upgrade of libicu to a different version than 68. The command exited with a successful status. A real package manager would have detected the package conflict and reported it, giving you resolution options, or errored out in a non-interactive terminal. Why were we trying to pin versions in the first place? You guessed it, package breakages.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't manage dev dependencies for projects in home-brew, just software for which I am a mere user. I probably wouldn't use apt and friends for those, either—not directly on my workstation anyway, maybe in some pinned-OS-version VM—unless my workstation happened to be identical to my deploy target and was guaranteed to stay that way. For a macOS build for C or C++ or anything along those lines, I'd probably vendor dependencies.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
bassdropvroom 5y ago
On the planet that runs arbitrary community maintained Ruby scripts to install packages, and the planet where doing brew update requires a full days work + max CPU usage.
lloeki 5y ago
It isn't, but there's MacPorts, nixpkgs, pkgsrc, and ArchMac (although I kinda dropped the ball on the latter)

by __jem 5y ago

jpgvm 5y ago

Agree as a Mac user. I miss pacman from Arch. Now -that- is a nice package manager. It took the best (simple) parts from Gentoo and combined them with the better parts of apt/rpm/zypp etc.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I always found pacman a little weird to use, but I think that was more a function of its UI -- its commands and options just weren't easily memorable for me, and I had to look them up almost every time. Its actual functionality was great, though.
lloeki 5y ago
So WDYT of this? https://www.archmac.org/ https://www.archmac.org/ (But please read this) https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.html https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.htm...

irateswami 5y ago

Homebrew is more transparent and approachable, I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt. Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version of whatever software packages I'm trying to install. I end up just having to adding various libraries and repos to my sources list to get the version I need, or go to an outside dependency manager like gvm, sdkman, etc which is basically homebrew anyway. Homebrew is for devs that need to get shit done, apt is for computer scientists that love the tool more than solving problems with a tool. For the record, I'm on both linux and mac and there's plenty of upside and downside to both.

regularfry 5y ago
More accurate to say that apt is for the sysadmin, perhaps.
cookiengineer 5y ago
You're extrapolating from Debian's packaging concept to other distros, though your argument does not apply to most of the rolling distros out there. On a rolling distro (e.g. using pacman, or say yast2 and others for sake of argument) you typically ship the header files included with the libraries, so that you don't need multiple versions of the same library installed. On Debian/Ubuntu, however, it will always end up with that mess of dozens of versions of the same library because all PPAs are somewhat outdated and used different versions of specific libraries once they were published.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  That's the problem isn't it? Whichever problem you point at in Linux, the answer is invariably the same: "you're holding it wr^W^W^^W you're using the wrong distro, the wrong package manager, the wrong DE, the wrong version of any of those things". And, invariably, for any problem the one true combination is different.
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    And that's why forks suck and everyone should use a spork. Having options that cater to different usecases is confusing. You don't really need to take big bites anyway.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      - Hey, your fork is broken, and made out of plastic. - You should use the oak box set of Forkuntu 12.4, no problems with forks there. - Yes, but it lacks any spoons - For spoons there's always Spoontoo. - But... I want both spoons and forks... - For that you can always tweak a few dozen unrelated work orders, menus and item descriptions in Sporkian. But that will only work witn Sporkian unstable, and needs a special tablecloth. - Okay... What about knives?

moshmosh 5y ago

Homebrew's very up to date, without that cutting-edge quality risking system stability (since that's totally separate) and has an incredible number of supported packages, including tons of closed-source stuff, out of the box. No hunting down PPAs or obscure unofficial back-port packages or anything. The only Linux package managers I've seen even approach it (not match, but approach) are from bleeding-edge distros like Arch or Gentoo, but those come at a harsh stability cost since they also manage the rest of your system, including all the shared libs (ugh) and system-level packages (I gather that's the case on Arch, it sure was on Gentoo when I used it for many years, mostly because I loved Portage and OpenRC)

sagarm 5y ago
Some of this is a matter of taste, clearly. I strongly prefer having my system packages being rock solid; I can always fetch updated software for the very few cases where I want that. However, my aversion to homebrew goes beyond taste: my experience with homebrew is rife with breakages. To be fair we were trying to use it in a CI system, which will very quickly reveal a buggy system. By contrast, apt/dnf are rock solid when used in CI. An actual example: we tried providing our own recipe to install a particular version of libicu. This triggered an upgrade of some dependency; that triggered an upgrade of libicu to a different version than 68. The command exited with a successful status. A real package manager would have detected the package conflict and reported it, giving you resolution options, or errored out in a non-interactive terminal. Why were we trying to pin versions in the first place? You guessed it, package breakages.
- moshmosh 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't manage dev dependencies for projects in home-brew, just software for which I am a mere user. I probably wouldn't use apt and friends for those, either—not directly on my workstation anyway, maybe in some pinned-OS-version VM—unless my workstation happened to be identical to my deploy target and was guaranteed to stay that way. For a macOS build for C or C++ or anything along those lines, I'd probably vendor dependencies.
soraminazuki 5y ago

bassdropvroom 5y ago

On the planet that runs arbitrary community maintained Ruby scripts to install packages, and the planet where doing brew update requires a full days work + max CPU usage.

lloeki 5y ago

It isn't, but there's MacPorts, nixpkgs, pkgsrc, and ArchMac (although I kinda dropped the ball on the latter)