4 ms·

I feel your pain, but can't help blaming Apple rather than Homebrew. They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features, homebrew is m

I feel your pain, but can't help blaming Apple rather than Homebrew. They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features, homebrew is merely following their lead and focusing on bleeding edge users. Maybe the logic is: if you don't want constant churn you wouldn't be on a mac.

apostacy 5y ago
But Homebrew didn't used to be that way when I started using it. And with some fairly small changes it could go a really long way to supporting more users. TBH if I had the time, I would roll up my sleeves and do it myself. The whole reason that I used Homebrew to begin with in 2014 was to help mitigate these problems. I think there has been a cultural shift away from being more useful for a larger base of users, to being optimal and "clean". The least it could do is confirm before it makes irreversible and sometimes breaking changes to your system. I don't see any good reason to delete your distfiles after potentially installing an incompatible package. And compared to most Linux based package managers, Homebrew makes big changes to its interface frequently, which makes it a headache to keep up with. Just look at how much casks have changed in the last two years. Anyway, when I felt I could no longer rely on Homebrew, that was the last straw for me dumping macOS.
dahart 5y ago
> They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features I thought the story was that Apple had a problem with GNU licensing, and that was the reason everything got locked to ~2007 software, forcing everyone who wants to use bash and GNU utils to resort to a package manager. Yeah… googling it, people have long been saying GPL v3 is what Apple has a problem with: http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653485
- pxc 5y ago
  What you're talking about has nothing to do with what GP said. Apple cheerily breaks functionality for end users when they decide to remove or replace APIs on every major release of macOS. This tends to hit power users especially hard, as they often use tools that extend Apple's narrow facilities for things like handling keyboard input, managing windows, or controlling applications' audio volume through third-party tools that rely on internals of macOS that are not supposed to be public-facing, and those get broken more often. If your favorite tool relies on an API that gets pulled and doesn't (or can't) get rewritten when the new macOS release is in beta, you're SOL. Homebrew breaking on macOS upgrade is also due to one thing that's fundamental to Homebrew's design, which is that it tries to rely as much as possible on that same external base system which Apple provides but destructively revises whenever it sees fit. (This design choice is apparently the author of Homebrew made because relative independence from the base system meant too much recompiling for him on Homebrew's competitors at the time.) Package managers are used to install a hell of a lot more than bash. The idea that they wouldn't be necessary on macOS if only no popular tools were licensed under the GPLv3 is laughable.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - apostacy 5y ago
    If you have any kind complex toolchains, then a major update can be a real burden. Just for me, using a customized desktop, iOS app development, and being a zfs user means that I had to set aside a lot of time for updates. And beyond that, Apple has become really sloppy with new releases, and you're best off waiting at least six months for the major bugs to be ironed out.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

apostacy 5y ago

But Homebrew didn't used to be that way when I started using it. And with some fairly small changes it could go a really long way to supporting more users. TBH if I had the time, I would roll up my sleeves and do it myself. The whole reason that I used Homebrew to begin with in 2014 was to help mitigate these problems. I think there has been a cultural shift away from being more useful for a larger base of users, to being optimal and "clean". The least it could do is confirm before it makes irreversible and sometimes breaking changes to your system. I don't see any good reason to delete your distfiles after potentially installing an incompatible package. And compared to most Linux based package managers, Homebrew makes big changes to its interface frequently, which makes it a headache to keep up with. Just look at how much casks have changed in the last two years. Anyway, when I felt I could no longer rely on Homebrew, that was the last straw for me dumping macOS.

dahart 5y ago

> They made an OS that users can't bear to upgrade because of removed features I thought the story was that Apple had a problem with GNU licensing, and that was the reason everything got locked to ~2007 software, forcing everyone who wants to use bash and GNU utils to resort to a package manager. Yeah… googling it, people have long been saying GPL v3 is what Apple has a problem with: http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653485

pxc 5y ago
What you're talking about has nothing to do with what GP said. Apple cheerily breaks functionality for end users when they decide to remove or replace APIs on every major release of macOS. This tends to hit power users especially hard, as they often use tools that extend Apple's narrow facilities for things like handling keyboard input, managing windows, or controlling applications' audio volume through third-party tools that rely on internals of macOS that are not supposed to be public-facing, and those get broken more often. If your favorite tool relies on an API that gets pulled and doesn't (or can't) get rewritten when the new macOS release is in beta, you're SOL. Homebrew breaking on macOS upgrade is also due to one thing that's fundamental to Homebrew's design, which is that it tries to rely as much as possible on that same external base system which Apple provides but destructively revises whenever it sees fit. (This design choice is apparently the author of Homebrew made because relative independence from the base system meant too much recompiling for him on Homebrew's competitors at the time.) Package managers are used to install a hell of a lot more than bash. The idea that they wouldn't be necessary on macOS if only no popular tools were licensed under the GPLv3 is laughable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- apostacy 5y ago
  If you have any kind complex toolchains, then a major update can be a real burden. Just for me, using a customized desktop, iOS app development, and being a zfs user means that I had to set aside a lot of time for updates. And beyond that, Apple has become really sloppy with new releases, and you're best off waiting at least six months for the major bugs to be ironed out.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]