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Except that most other open source package managers strive to be good at what they do. Brew has a long history of treating any criticism of their truly woeful
by stephenr 5y ago
Except that most other open source package managers strive to be good at what they do.
Brew has a long history of treating any criticism of their truly woeful approach to security, dependency management etc, with "well fuck you we dont want to hear your opinion".
- astrange 5y agoThere were other better macOS package managers before it; macports was sort of even Apple sponsored. Everyone switched to brew even though it was the most poorly designed because it came from the Rails hype era where everyone wanted all their tools to be written in Ruby and didn’t care about anything else.
- stephenr 5y agoYeah no kidding.
- riffraff 5y agoI used and still use macports, but there were valid reasons to switch to homebrew: macports did not have precompiled packages, did not use system libraries, and machines were not as powerful as they are now. This meant if you wanted to install, say, ImageMagick, you would spend one day compiling stuff. Also contributing a brew recipe was (and probably still is) easier than contributing to macports, and brew casks are pretty convenient. I deeply dislike some of the choices of homebrew, but I can understand why it was popular, and it wasn't just because of the ruby hype.