3 ms·
I've not used macs for a few years, but has homebrew become a lot better then? Because my recollection of it is that it worked fine for small sets of well-main
by emn13 5y ago
I've not used macs for a few years, but has homebrew become a lot better then? Because my recollection of it is that it worked fine for small sets of well-maintained packages, but it's much, much slower than the linux package managers, and there were tons of compatibility issues once you even slightly left the beaten path. Also, I remember fighting with many apple CLI tools; they seemed to be wildly out of date with the comparable linux tooling, to the point that you sometimes needed to homebrew something technically already part of the base OS just to get other things working (e.g. IIRC bash)
Incidentally, on windows there are the beginnings of package managers nowadays, e.g. chocolatey. They're nothing like as good as those in linux, but better than nothing. Chocolatey's focus isn't quite the same as homebrew, however, so they're not strictly comparable.
- bombcar 5y agoIt ... "works". For most things you may want, it works pretty well, but it's not at advanced as even Gentoo's portage, and once you leave the beaten path it can be all sorts of hell trying to figure out how exactly to compile something yourself. However, I've experienced the same on Ubuntu and RedHat - if they don't have what you want in a repo already, and you can't find one providing it, trying to roll your own can cause all sorts of fun explosions. Anything GPL included with MacOS is stuck at the GPL v2 - since many things like bash went to v3 they don't update anymore; one of the reasons MacOS changed to zsh as the default shell.