4 ms·

Yes, agreed. Someone asked if there can be a progress bar on Homebrew. Instantly shutdown the thread. Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has serve

Yes, agreed. Someone asked if there can be a progress bar on Homebrew. Instantly shutdown the thread. Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time.

Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
Homebrew is still here to stay. If Apple provide a package manager, then it likely that people will swarm to that but again it depends on how much capabilities and feature parity it have over other package managers. Microsoft is working on this with their Winget. Homebrew is great for casual and daily users since we don't have to keep hunting for software updates. And Homebrew does have a progress bar for each app. The bar is for the downloading but other than that, I don't think it need a progress bar for installtion since they are quick to install than using the GUI installation.
- pxc 5y ago
  Winget isn't really a package manager so much as an installer wrangler and frontend for the Microsoft App store. Of the nearly 30,000 manifest files inside the winget repo, fewer than 150 of them define a single dependency. The rest run executable installers that can do basically anything, or just grab an app from the Microsoft Store. It doesn't do anything to eliminate the chaos of every program doing whatever the fuck it wants to get itself installed or create a common ecosystem of integrated packages, which are the main points of package management. Winget also lacks most of the core functionality of a package manager, including knowing how to uninstall anything at all. But uninstallation will never work reliably on winget anyway, as long as winget an installer wrangler, because installer wranglers inherit unreliable and bespoke per-package installation/uninstallation procedures from existing Windows apps. After a year and a half in public, Winget is still just Chocolatey but faster and much worse in every other respect. There's basically nothing on offer on Windows if you want a package manager instead of just some automation wrapping executable installers. (Scoop is the closest thing, and it's sort of just now swinging back from the verge of death after months in limbo.) The fact that Microsoft announced a project and called it a package manager has done more or less nothing to change that.
mbesto 5y ago
> Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time. You are more than welcome to build your own alternative. Homebrew is open source and volunteer run. I'm sure there is a very valid reason requests like this get shot down. No wonder open source maintainers hate dealing with people like you. http://antirez.com/news/129 http://antirez.com/news/129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000746 https://github.com/kossnocorp/etiquette https://github.com/kossnocorp/etiquette
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I don't hate it, I just think there is room to improve. Also, no need to accuse me of not understanding open source development. I am thankful to you and others, at the same time it is I think OK to say it needs to improve. Although, I believe like a lot of technology pieces that sometimes it is not worth improving - just start from scratch. There is a lot of baggage with Homebrew.
- pxc 5y ago
  It seems this is the issue in question: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9186 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9186 The maintainer did close they issue but they didn't lock the thread. If there was a very valid reason the request got shot down, it went unstated afaict. (Fair enough if they just don't allow feature requests on the issue tracker, I guess)
handrous 5y ago
> Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time. Counterpoint: I've spent serious time (years) with, oh, six or seven package managers, in a couple decades of using package managers. More if you count Flatpack and stuff like that. Brew is my favorite, all-around. Package selection is incredible. Stability is excellent. It's a little slow and I think defaulting to updating the package list damn near every time one invokes the command is a really weird choice, but that's configurable. My second favorite? Docker :-) Third would probably be portage (from Gentoo), I guess. Then apt/dpkg. Worst I've used is easily Macports, and it's not even close—however, I switched years ago because it broke constantly under normal usage, on my machine, so for all I know it's great now—and I've never forgiven RPM-based distros for all the time I lost to RPM hell over the years, and for going so long with worse CLI tools than apt. Void's seems very nice, but I've not spent enough time with it to feel the rough edges.
- pxc 5y ago
  > I've never forgiven RPM-based distros for all the time I lost to RPM hell over the years, and for going so long with worse CLI tools than apt. apt and dpkg are way behind dnf and rpm these days, both in terms of the structure of packages and the interfaces of the high-level CLI tools What do you like best about Homebrew?
  - handrous 5y ago
    > What do you like best about Homebrew? Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces, which is part of why it's never, in nearly a decade, broken my system the way any others have. Homebrew's never made my system unbootable. Homebrew's never broken my GUI. Homebrew's never fucked up some driver that had been working totally fine. In another sense, that's totally fair if you consider the platform as a whole. It's really hard for Linux overall to separate user packages from system packages, mostly because it's all mixed up together in a way that it's not on MacOS or Windows—but a distro could take that approach, if they wanted. So, that'd be one thing. #1: Separation of a very complete and capable base GUI OS from the rest of my packages, with the base OS upgrading in lock-step and very reliably, and everything else totally disconnected from that. #2 would be the package selection. The number of times I've found some lowish-star-count project on Github, blindly done "brew install [guess at package name]" and had it work, is crazy. Non-free stuff? It's there too. AFAIK Gentoo and Arch are the only ones that even come close—but then you're stuck either hoping rolling-everything doesn't break your system, or trying to maintain a jenga tower of pinned packages and still risking breaking your system when you eventually do update them. I'm actually not sure there's a single piece of software on any of my Mac hardware, for work or play, that's not either, 1) from Apple, or 2) installed via Homebrew. And I've never added any kind of 3rd-party repo to it. (a minor point: it's also nice that I can guess the correct package name more often with Homebrew than on Debian and Ubuntu) #3 is that it has never, ever broken for me, under normal operation. An "install" or "update" or "upgrade" or "remove" has never broken my package manager itself, or its package database, or left its installed dependency tree so deeply fucked that I lose an hour or five un-fucking it (in fact, I've never seen that happen at all with Homebrew). OS upgrades have occasionally made me run a one-time fix to its directory permissions. Maybe that's happened twice in a decade of use? AFAI can recall, that's it. Macports borked itself badly under normal operation every 3-4 months while I was using it, while having a smaller package selection and compiling (=taking way longer) more often—this was, IIRC, like 2011, though, so again, it may be better now. Every other package manager I've used for any serious length of time, I've repeatedly seen get in weird states that required substantial fiddling before I could use them for anything again, after what should have been boring and normal usage. (see point #1 for why it would also be a lot more tolerable if it did have that trouble, than it is when that happens on, say, Linux, and indeed, that's the only reason I was able to struggle along with Macports for a little over a year before switching—I could just rm its directory and start over, after the second time from a script that did it for me, without causing any harm whatsoever to my OS itself)

Yes, agreed. Someone asked if there can be a progress bar on Homebrew. Instantly shutdown the thread. Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time.

Isthatablackgsd 5y ago

Homebrew is still here to stay. If Apple provide a package manager, then it likely that people will swarm to that but again it depends on how much capabilities and feature parity it have over other package managers. Microsoft is working on this with their Winget. Homebrew is great for casual and daily users since we don't have to keep hunting for software updates. And Homebrew does have a progress bar for each app. The bar is for the downloading but other than that, I don't think it need a progress bar for installtion since they are quick to install than using the GUI installation.

pxc 5y ago
Winget isn't really a package manager so much as an installer wrangler and frontend for the Microsoft App store. Of the nearly 30,000 manifest files inside the winget repo, fewer than 150 of them define a single dependency. The rest run executable installers that can do basically anything, or just grab an app from the Microsoft Store. It doesn't do anything to eliminate the chaos of every program doing whatever the fuck it wants to get itself installed or create a common ecosystem of integrated packages, which are the main points of package management. Winget also lacks most of the core functionality of a package manager, including knowing how to uninstall anything at all. But uninstallation will never work reliably on winget anyway, as long as winget an installer wrangler, because installer wranglers inherit unreliable and bespoke per-package installation/uninstallation procedures from existing Windows apps. After a year and a half in public, Winget is still just Chocolatey but faster and much worse in every other respect. There's basically nothing on offer on Windows if you want a package manager instead of just some automation wrapping executable installers. (Scoop is the closest thing, and it's sort of just now swinging back from the verge of death after months in limbo.) The fact that Microsoft announced a project and called it a package manager has done more or less nothing to change that.

mbesto 5y ago

> Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time. You are more than welcome to build your own alternative. Homebrew is open source and volunteer run. I'm sure there is a very valid reason requests like this get shot down. No wonder open source maintainers hate dealing with people like you. http://antirez.com/news/129 http://antirez.com/news/129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12000746 https://github.com/kossnocorp/etiquette https://github.com/kossnocorp/etiquette

systemvoltage 5y ago
I don't hate it, I just think there is room to improve. Also, no need to accuse me of not understanding open source development. I am thankful to you and others, at the same time it is I think OK to say it needs to improve. Although, I believe like a lot of technology pieces that sometimes it is not worth improving - just start from scratch. There is a lot of baggage with Homebrew.
pxc 5y ago
It seems this is the issue in question: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9186 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9186 The maintainer did close they issue but they didn't lock the thread. If there was a very valid reason the request got shot down, it went unstated afaict. (Fair enough if they just don't allow feature requests on the issue tracker, I guess)

handrous 5y ago

> Homebrew is old and it needs to be replaced. It has served its time. Counterpoint: I've spent serious time (years) with, oh, six or seven package managers, in a couple decades of using package managers. More if you count Flatpack and stuff like that. Brew is my favorite, all-around. Package selection is incredible. Stability is excellent. It's a little slow and I think defaulting to updating the package list damn near every time one invokes the command is a really weird choice, but that's configurable. My second favorite? Docker :-) Third would probably be portage (from Gentoo), I guess. Then apt/dpkg. Worst I've used is easily Macports, and it's not even close—however, I switched years ago because it broke constantly under normal usage, on my machine, so for all I know it's great now—and I've never forgiven RPM-based distros for all the time I lost to RPM hell over the years, and for going so long with worse CLI tools than apt. Void's seems very nice, but I've not spent enough time with it to feel the rough edges.

pxc 5y ago
> I've never forgiven RPM-based distros for all the time I lost to RPM hell over the years, and for going so long with worse CLI tools than apt. apt and dpkg are way behind dnf and rpm these days, both in terms of the structure of packages and the interfaces of the high-level CLI tools What do you like best about Homebrew?
- handrous 5y ago
  > What do you like best about Homebrew? Some of its advantages are, in a sense, unfair, because it doesn't manage my OS or its most vital pieces, which is part of why it's never, in nearly a decade, broken my system the way any others have. Homebrew's never made my system unbootable. Homebrew's never broken my GUI. Homebrew's never fucked up some driver that had been working totally fine. In another sense, that's totally fair if you consider the platform as a whole. It's really hard for Linux overall to separate user packages from system packages, mostly because it's all mixed up together in a way that it's not on MacOS or Windows—but a distro could take that approach, if they wanted. So, that'd be one thing. #1: Separation of a very complete and capable base GUI OS from the rest of my packages, with the base OS upgrading in lock-step and very reliably, and everything else totally disconnected from that. #2 would be the package selection. The number of times I've found some lowish-star-count project on Github, blindly done "brew install [guess at package name]" and had it work, is crazy. Non-free stuff? It's there too. AFAIK Gentoo and Arch are the only ones that even come close—but then you're stuck either hoping rolling-everything doesn't break your system, or trying to maintain a jenga tower of pinned packages and still risking breaking your system when you eventually do update them. I'm actually not sure there's a single piece of software on any of my Mac hardware, for work or play, that's not either, 1) from Apple, or 2) installed via Homebrew. And I've never added any kind of 3rd-party repo to it. (a minor point: it's also nice that I can guess the correct package name more often with Homebrew than on Debian and Ubuntu) #3 is that it has never, ever broken for me, under normal operation. An "install" or "update" or "upgrade" or "remove" has never broken my package manager itself, or its package database, or left its installed dependency tree so deeply fucked that I lose an hour or five un-fucking it (in fact, I've never seen that happen at all with Homebrew). OS upgrades have occasionally made me run a one-time fix to its directory permissions. Maybe that's happened twice in a decade of use? AFAI can recall, that's it. Macports borked itself badly under normal operation every 3-4 months while I was using it, while having a smaller package selection and compiling (=taking way longer) more often—this was, IIRC, like 2011, though, so again, it may be better now. Every other package manager I've used for any serious length of time, I've repeatedly seen get in weird states that required substantial fiddling before I could use them for anything again, after what should have been boring and normal usage. (see point #1 for why it would also be a lot more tolerable if it did have that trouble, than it is when that happens on, say, Linux, and indeed, that's the only reason I was able to struggle along with Macports for a little over a year before switching—I could just rm its directory and start over, after the second time from a script that did it for me, without causing any harm whatsoever to my OS itself)