22 ms·

Tea: A new package manager from the creator of brew

211 points by thenipper 4y ago

llimllib 4y ago
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778924 interesting that the page barely mentions the blockchain, which seemed to be the key selling point on the page at launch. I guess nowadays you should use tea if you wish that nix had fewer packages and more blockchain?
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Yeah, wow. “Authenticating your GitHub entitles you to unique NFT reward badges, including one with rare artwork specific to how soon you authenticate.” Not touching this then.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - toxik 4y ago
  - kelthuzad 4y ago
    "tea is creating new technologies that will change how open source is funded" They are trying new approaches to a persisting problem. Nothing wrong with trying out new things like this, whatever works. Let's see the results and make judgments based on that.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
woodruffw 4y ago
I've said it in previous threads about tea, but just to reiterate: Homebrew is not affiliated with tea, and its creator has not been involved in Homebrew for a long time (at least as long as I've helped maintain it, which is 6+ years at this point).
- codeslave13 4y ago
  But the title is accurate no?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Yes. I meant that more as "Homebrew has undergone significant development changes since the creator of tea was last involved." In particular, the transition to the current architecture (favoring bottles over source builds on clients) happened well after him. Edit: One of the reasons why I think it's important to continue to clarify this is because tea's repository description contains "brew2," implying a successor relationship.
    - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
      Homebrew's kind of a dumpster fire now tho. The whole "you don't ever get to use an old version" thing was when I jumped ship. The fact that it can't handle two architectures in one install is also a big problem, though can be generally worked around
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Homebrew is almost entirely beholden to the behavior of an operating system (and entire hardware ecosystem) that we have no say over. It also was simply never meant to be a versioned package manager, because the majority of its users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling. You want different things than Homebrew was designed to do, which is perfectly fine. But we make those constraints abundantly clear in our documentation, and they produce a vastly better user experience for 99% of our users.
        the_jeremy 4y ago
        At my company, Homebrew is the de facto package manager for Mac. My team doesn't prefer constant rolling updates, but we do work around them. Have you polled users in any way to be sure that 99% of them consider this a feature, and not an issue they have to deal with?
throwup 4y ago
https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... > Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. :thinking_emoji:
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Oh god, WTF. I was half excited about this for a second but it's just crypto BS.
  - beattheprose 4y ago
    Same :(
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Assuming Binance will put this on their BNB chain, yikes. BNB is filled with more trash, spam, and scams than even other chains. Most people in the space don’t even want anything to do with it - which is really saying something.
RL_Quine 4y ago
> Upon successful submission of a package, the package maintainer will receive an NFT to evidence their work and contribution. The holder of this NFT will automatically receive all rewards associated with the package. Package maintainers may transfer maintenance ownership over a package to another package maintainer by simply transferring the package’s NFT. Successful transfer of the NFT will lead to the new owner automatically receiving future package rewards. I want literally nothing to do with a cross between a binary distribution tool and a cryptocurrency pump and dump.
- jerpint 4y ago
  What makes you think this is a pump and dump scheme? Other than the word blockchain
  - j4hdufd8 4y ago
    The word NFT
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    The website linked, and it's associated information all absolutely scream red flags and is functionally similar to a hoard of other schemes. It's a technically simple product (distribute binaries from a webserver) with a completely arbitrary cryptocurrency stuffed onto the side, allowing for bombastic, buzzword filled claims which just defy reality. It attempts to promote itself by driving users who will get some form of profit sharing as part of their participation, promising some sort of rewards paid by the creator. > Package maintainers will publish their releases to a decentralized registry powered by a Byzantine fault-tolerant blockchain to eliminate single sources of failure, provide immutable releases, and allow communities to govern their regions of the open-source ecosystem, independent of external agendas. It's existence is an attempt to justify the creation of yet another cryptocurrency, not as a serious solution to any problem that exists in distributing software.
    - febeling 4y ago
      Is the fact that many maintainers burn out and earn no money and little recognition not a serious problem?
mberning 4y ago
I can see the benefit of installing things in the home directory. Thats something that was always frustrating with brew. You install postgres, but where do things like the configs and data directory live? But I also don’t want a bloated 50gb home dir.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  FWIW, nix (the package manager) can do this right now, and without all the crypto BS attached. https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/quick-start.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/quick-start.html For example, here's the config to set up development environment for headscale: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/6a311f4ab68a4d85679924c1c39b711678a49e83/flake.nix https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/6a311f4ab68a4d856...
  - rafram 4y ago
    I really want to use and like Nix. But I don’t want to write code (in an esoteric programming language no one else uses, no less) to install/manage my dependencies! It feels too much like it’s trying to be an all-encompassing digital lifestyle instead of just a package manager that I think about only when I need to install a package.
    - ananthakumaran 4y ago
      Learning the syntax is the easy part, the language is quite simple with few rules. But, I agree with the other sentiments. It needs a better UX for it to be mainstream. There are few attempts being made[1][2], only time will tell 1: https://www.jetpack.io/devbox/docs/ https://www.jetpack.io/devbox/docs/ 2: https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Very cool looking! This really speaks to me--no curating some global environment of tools, everything is per project. All of your dependencies defined in the README.md. I'm looking forward to playing with this!
- k__ 4y ago
  Yes, finally package management like it was meant to be. Hopefully it's less clunky than brew.
colordrops 4y ago
Use home manager instead.
garbanz0 4y ago
I'm guessing the people publishing the package need to pay gas fees? Not ideal since people make packages as a labor of love. Maybe a community fund to pay gas fees would work.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  It's not ethereum, it's some other bespoke blockchain to issue NFTs on.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Not even just gas fees -- the publishers have to outright pay to get a package added: > Specifically, the package maintainer must: > [...] Contribute to the package’s reputation and trustworthiness by steeping tea tokens. https://github.com/teaxyz/white-paper/blob/main/white-paper.md#package-submission https://github.com/teaxyz/white-paper/blob/main/white-paper....
svnpenn 4y ago
no native windows support: > We already work on Linux, macOS, and WSL; soon we’ll support Windows natively.
- pxc 4y ago
  In defense of Tea here, a proper package manager (as opposed to something that just downloads prebuilt binaries or installers directly from vendors) that runs natively on Windows is nonexistent and (I think) unprecedented (outside of POSIX emulation environments like MSYS2 and Cygwin). (The closest thing to a real package manager in terms of use cases (used for installing things like command line tools and compilers) on Windows is Scoop. But it doesn't use a repo built from a ports tree or a collection of source packages like apt, Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix, etc.) Tea isn't neglecting a common platform in its problem domain, and by even planning native Windows support it's actually pretty exceptional.
RadiozRadioz 4y ago
This readme file reads like an infomercial / sales pitch. Further increasing my scepticism.
frizlab 4y ago
Okay I read the full readme and things have changed since last time I read about this. Now this seems to bring actual neat features to package management vs. what exists now. I wonder how they did truly relocatable packages… probably like Nix did it, I suppose? If this really turns out to be an easier-than-Nix Nix, it could be great! There’s still the NFT/crypto side I do not like, but the product looks somewhat fair compared to what this was a few months back.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Just when I though NFTs couldn’t get any dumber. The package manager itself seems interesting but I’m not touching it if it has crypto nonsense in it.
kubb 4y ago
This is like nix but in alpha and with NTFs. I'll stick to nix.
gpanders 4y ago
I was very excited about this until I read the comments here. I didn’t notice the NFT/blockchain stuff when I read through the README, but I agree with other commenters here that that is very off-putting. I really don’t want anything to do with Web3 or anything blockchain. It’s a bummer too, because it looks like a more sane version of using Nix as a package manager. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but my experience using Nix as a package manager on macOS was very bad. I understand the value proposition of isolated development environments, but the execution with Nix left a lot to be desired (in my experience). Something that provides similar benefits in a nicer package would be very welcome.
- k__ 4y ago
  Maybe a person who can build a "saner Nix" might be smart enough to decide that "web3" is a good fit for the project?
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    "looks like" does not mean "is"- especially when the person commenting "looks like" didn't actually use it. It's pretty easy to build something that only "looks like" a saner nix.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    Or maybe the person who decides "web3" is a good fit for the project isn't smart enough to build a "saner Nix".
  - simonw 4y ago
    Whether someone is technically talented and whether they have good judgment about "web3" have proved over the past few years to be entirely unrelated to each other.
rafram 4y ago
> ^^ same one-liner but works for anyone on the Internet Oh my God, a one-liner that pipes curl to sh, downloads and executes a package from npm, and spins up a web server serving whichever directory you were unlucky enough to be in, all without a single confirmation prompt or authenticity check. And it’s blockchain!
shadowgovt 4y ago
TBH, I don't get excited about new package managers. The last thing I want is a balkanized distribution space, and every new package manager is just one more place that package maintainers have to be aware of, learn, and configure. That makes each one a net negative by default, so the value-add that other package managers don't bring to the table has to be significant to get my attention.
- chrisandchris 4y ago
  Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Same here, I don't need another package manager. There's no need to create another one. Why not re-use existing technology instead of re-inventing the wheel all the time?
- return_to_monke 4y ago
  I don't get angry for reinventing the wheel - but if you do, please make it compatible with state of the art existing tools. They at least seemed to have a try at that
rough-sea 4y ago
Built with Deno
anderspitman 4y ago
The other day I was looking for a simple, lightweight userspace binary package manager. Nix was exciting for a minute until I realized it requires root to install unless you jump through hoops. My goal is to be able to have something so lightweight and fast I don't hesitate to use it to install my favorite packages on every ephemeral VM I spin up. Anything like this out there?
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  Have you tried Homebrew?
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    I gave it a shot. It was way to slow for my use case. And I think it was several hundred MBs just for homebrew itself if I recall correctly. Maybe software these days just has too many recursive dependencies.
- reisub0 4y ago
  Nix does need root by default, but I use this https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot on all the Linux boxes I use.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
Considering the broken most basic basic fundamentals of packaing and system integration in brew since day one (installing shared executables and /usr/local itself as owned by a rando user steve or whoever happens to install brew) only partly fixed grudgingly and by force after Apple just took over ownership of the /usr and /usr/local directories, this fits. Another equally well considered idea.
dmitriid 4y ago
This could've been human-friendly nix. And then they went ahead and bolted NFTs onto it.
lvass 4y ago
The security concerns here are really, really glaring. All the way down to having your system hacked, by someone who pushed crap to a blockchain, for merely sending a typo into your shell should you decide to install this piece of condensed insanity and the suggested shell hack. Null terminated strings and "billion dollar mistakes" are much saner than this.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pfortuny 4y ago
Honestly, the first paragraph cannot be serious and, if it is, I am sorry to say it is delusional (I am judging the text, not the person).
garganzol 4y ago
I like the part where tea is a virtual environment with freedom and everything. I do not like the part where "tea is creating new technologies that will change how open source is funded" with all those buzzwords, NFTs and stuff. Those are totally different problems and I do not want a middle man who sits on both payments and distribution - this is a direct road to an utopian walled garden which it will inevitably become, sooner or later.
unintendedcons 4y ago
People here seem to really hate the blockchaininess of tea. We'll see how it pans out. Had anyone tried registering any packages? I have a toy package on npm, maybe I'll run through the paces
panda_2134 4y ago
I am personally fed up with the brew devs and have switched to nix on my mac instead. The UX of brew is already disgusting, and I don't think a crypto-embedded package manager will be any better.
pxc 4y ago
This is pretty interesting as the first general-purpose package manager outside of the functional package management paradigm to directly complete with Nix in terms of features like ephemeral shell environments and magic shebangs. At a glance, it's not a reimplementation of Nix with a porcelain. It makes no attempt at Nix-like hermeticity; installation of tea itself fails on NixOS with a dynamic linking error. But it also has the strengths one would expect from the creator of Homebrew taking a second stab at general-purpose package management: the documentation and CLI are charming (if incomplete), it's much faster than Homebrew, and it adds capabilities that Homebrew lacks and which are rare outside of the Nix world. As a Nix person, I'm definitely interested to see what tea can achieve and what kind of userbase it ends up attracting. The less strict approach, day-one emphasis on UX, and choice of a 'dumb', commonplace configuration DSL (YAML) for package definitions could certainly incline a lot of people who shy away from Nix to give it a try. I wonder how binary caching and relocatability are solved, given the apparent per-user prefixes in the homedirs. Nix is really blowing up right now, and still has a huge head start in the breadth and usefulness of Nixpkgs. But a competitor like this really vindicates the recent turn towards emphasizing UX and documentation. If Nix developers to get the new CLI and the flakes schema formally released soon, I think we'll be come out ahead even of 'next-gen' efforts from outside the paradigm, like tea. If they don't, it'll be a missed opportunity for our community.

211 points by thenipper 4y ago

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778924 interesting that the page barely mentions the blockchain, which seemed to be the key selling point on the page at launch. I guess nowadays you should use tea if you wish that nix had fewer packages and more blockchain?

robin_reala 4y ago
Yeah, wow. “Authenticating your GitHub entitles you to unique NFT reward badges, including one with rare artwork specific to how soon you authenticate.” Not touching this then.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toxik 4y ago
- kelthuzad 4y ago
  "tea is creating new technologies that will change how open source is funded" They are trying new approaches to a persisting problem. Nothing wrong with trying out new things like this, whatever works. Let's see the results and make judgments based on that.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago

woodruffw 4y ago

I've said it in previous threads about tea, but just to reiterate: Homebrew is not affiliated with tea, and its creator has not been involved in Homebrew for a long time (at least as long as I've helped maintain it, which is 6+ years at this point).

codeslave13 4y ago
But the title is accurate no?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Yes. I meant that more as "Homebrew has undergone significant development changes since the creator of tea was last involved." In particular, the transition to the current architecture (favoring bottles over source builds on clients) happened well after him. Edit: One of the reasons why I think it's important to continue to clarify this is because tea's repository description contains "brew2," implying a successor relationship.
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    Homebrew's kind of a dumpster fire now tho. The whole "you don't ever get to use an old version" thing was when I jumped ship. The fact that it can't handle two architectures in one install is also a big problem, though can be generally worked around
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Homebrew is almost entirely beholden to the behavior of an operating system (and entire hardware ecosystem) that we have no say over. It also was simply never meant to be a versioned package manager, because the majority of its users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling. You want different things than Homebrew was designed to do, which is perfectly fine. But we make those constraints abundantly clear in our documentation, and they produce a vastly better user experience for 99% of our users.
      - the_jeremy 4y ago
        At my company, Homebrew is the de facto package manager for Mac. My team doesn't prefer constant rolling updates, but we do work around them. Have you polled users in any way to be sure that 99% of them consider this a feature, and not an issue they have to deal with?

throwup 4y ago

https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... > Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. :thinking_emoji:

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Oh god, WTF. I was half excited about this for a second but it's just crypto BS.
- beattheprose 4y ago
  Same :(
kkielhofner 4y ago
Assuming Binance will put this on their BNB chain, yikes. BNB is filled with more trash, spam, and scams than even other chains. Most people in the space don’t even want anything to do with it - which is really saying something.

RL_Quine 4y ago

> Upon successful submission of a package, the package maintainer will receive an NFT to evidence their work and contribution. The holder of this NFT will automatically receive all rewards associated with the package. Package maintainers may transfer maintenance ownership over a package to another package maintainer by simply transferring the package’s NFT. Successful transfer of the NFT will lead to the new owner automatically receiving future package rewards. I want literally nothing to do with a cross between a binary distribution tool and a cryptocurrency pump and dump.

jerpint 4y ago
What makes you think this is a pump and dump scheme? Other than the word blockchain
- j4hdufd8 4y ago
  The word NFT
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  The website linked, and it's associated information all absolutely scream red flags and is functionally similar to a hoard of other schemes. It's a technically simple product (distribute binaries from a webserver) with a completely arbitrary cryptocurrency stuffed onto the side, allowing for bombastic, buzzword filled claims which just defy reality. It attempts to promote itself by driving users who will get some form of profit sharing as part of their participation, promising some sort of rewards paid by the creator. > Package maintainers will publish their releases to a decentralized registry powered by a Byzantine fault-tolerant blockchain to eliminate single sources of failure, provide immutable releases, and allow communities to govern their regions of the open-source ecosystem, independent of external agendas. It's existence is an attempt to justify the creation of yet another cryptocurrency, not as a serious solution to any problem that exists in distributing software.
  - febeling 4y ago
    Is the fact that many maintainers burn out and earn no money and little recognition not a serious problem?

mberning 4y ago

I can see the benefit of installing things in the home directory. Thats something that was always frustrating with brew. You install postgres, but where do things like the configs and data directory live? But I also don’t want a bloated 50gb home dir.

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
FWIW, nix (the package manager) can do this right now, and without all the crypto BS attached. https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/quick-start.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/quick-start.html For example, here's the config to set up development environment for headscale: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/6a311f4ab68a4d85679924c1c39b711678a49e83/flake.nix https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/6a311f4ab68a4d856...
- rafram 4y ago
  I really want to use and like Nix. But I don’t want to write code (in an esoteric programming language no one else uses, no less) to install/manage my dependencies! It feels too much like it’s trying to be an all-encompassing digital lifestyle instead of just a package manager that I think about only when I need to install a package.
  - ananthakumaran 4y ago
    Learning the syntax is the easy part, the language is quite simple with few rules. But, I agree with the other sentiments. It needs a better UX for it to be mainstream. There are few attempts being made[1][2], only time will tell 1: https://www.jetpack.io/devbox/docs/ https://www.jetpack.io/devbox/docs/ 2: https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Very cool looking! This really speaks to me--no curating some global environment of tools, everything is per project. All of your dependencies defined in the README.md. I'm looking forward to playing with this!

k__ 4y ago
Yes, finally package management like it was meant to be. Hopefully it's less clunky than brew.

colordrops 4y ago

Use home manager instead.

garbanz0 4y ago

I'm guessing the people publishing the package need to pay gas fees? Not ideal since people make packages as a labor of love. Maybe a community fund to pay gas fees would work.

RL_Quine 4y ago
It's not ethereum, it's some other bespoke blockchain to issue NFTs on.
duskwuff 4y ago
Not even just gas fees -- the publishers have to outright pay to get a package added: > Specifically, the package maintainer must: > [...] Contribute to the package’s reputation and trustworthiness by steeping tea tokens. https://github.com/teaxyz/white-paper/blob/main/white-paper.md#package-submission https://github.com/teaxyz/white-paper/blob/main/white-paper....

svnpenn 4y ago

no native windows support: > We already work on Linux, macOS, and WSL; soon we’ll support Windows natively.

pxc 4y ago
In defense of Tea here, a proper package manager (as opposed to something that just downloads prebuilt binaries or installers directly from vendors) that runs natively on Windows is nonexistent and (I think) unprecedented (outside of POSIX emulation environments like MSYS2 and Cygwin). (The closest thing to a real package manager in terms of use cases (used for installing things like command line tools and compilers) on Windows is Scoop. But it doesn't use a repo built from a ports tree or a collection of source packages like apt, Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix, etc.) Tea isn't neglecting a common platform in its problem domain, and by even planning native Windows support it's actually pretty exceptional.

RadiozRadioz 4y ago

This readme file reads like an infomercial / sales pitch. Further increasing my scepticism.

frizlab 4y ago

Okay I read the full readme and things have changed since last time I read about this. Now this seems to bring actual neat features to package management vs. what exists now. I wonder how they did truly relocatable packages… probably like Nix did it, I suppose? If this really turns out to be an easier-than-Nix Nix, it could be great! There’s still the NFT/crypto side I do not like, but the product looks somewhat fair compared to what this was a few months back.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Just when I though NFTs couldn’t get any dumber. The package manager itself seems interesting but I’m not touching it if it has crypto nonsense in it.

kubb 4y ago

This is like nix but in alpha and with NTFs. I'll stick to nix.

gpanders 4y ago

I was very excited about this until I read the comments here. I didn’t notice the NFT/blockchain stuff when I read through the README, but I agree with other commenters here that that is very off-putting. I really don’t want anything to do with Web3 or anything blockchain. It’s a bummer too, because it looks like a more sane version of using Nix as a package manager. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but my experience using Nix as a package manager on macOS was very bad. I understand the value proposition of isolated development environments, but the execution with Nix left a lot to be desired (in my experience). Something that provides similar benefits in a nicer package would be very welcome.

k__ 4y ago
Maybe a person who can build a "saner Nix" might be smart enough to decide that "web3" is a good fit for the project?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  "looks like" does not mean "is"- especially when the person commenting "looks like" didn't actually use it. It's pretty easy to build something that only "looks like" a saner nix.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Or maybe the person who decides "web3" is a good fit for the project isn't smart enough to build a "saner Nix".
- simonw 4y ago
  Whether someone is technically talented and whether they have good judgment about "web3" have proved over the past few years to be entirely unrelated to each other.

rafram 4y ago

> ^^ same one-liner but works for anyone on the Internet Oh my God, a one-liner that pipes curl to sh, downloads and executes a package from npm, and spins up a web server serving whichever directory you were unlucky enough to be in, all without a single confirmation prompt or authenticity check. And it’s blockchain!

shadowgovt 4y ago

TBH, I don't get excited about new package managers. The last thing I want is a balkanized distribution space, and every new package manager is just one more place that package maintainers have to be aware of, learn, and configure. That makes each one a net negative by default, so the value-add that other package managers don't bring to the table has to be significant to get my attention.

chrisandchris 4y ago
Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Same here, I don't need another package manager. There's no need to create another one. Why not re-use existing technology instead of re-inventing the wheel all the time?
return_to_monke 4y ago
I don't get angry for reinventing the wheel - but if you do, please make it compatible with state of the art existing tools. They at least seemed to have a try at that

rough-sea 4y ago

Built with Deno

anderspitman 4y ago

The other day I was looking for a simple, lightweight userspace binary package manager. Nix was exciting for a minute until I realized it requires root to install unless you jump through hoops. My goal is to be able to have something so lightweight and fast I don't hesitate to use it to install my favorite packages on every ephemeral VM I spin up. Anything like this out there?

shepherdjerred 4y ago
Have you tried Homebrew?
- anderspitman 4y ago
  I gave it a shot. It was way to slow for my use case. And I think it was several hundred MBs just for homebrew itself if I recall correctly. Maybe software these days just has too many recursive dependencies.
reisub0 4y ago
Nix does need root by default, but I use this https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot on all the Linux boxes I use.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

Considering the broken most basic basic fundamentals of packaing and system integration in brew since day one (installing shared executables and /usr/local itself as owned by a rando user steve or whoever happens to install brew) only partly fixed grudgingly and by force after Apple just took over ownership of the /usr and /usr/local directories, this fits. Another equally well considered idea.

dmitriid 4y ago

This could've been human-friendly nix. And then they went ahead and bolted NFTs onto it.

lvass 4y ago

The security concerns here are really, really glaring. All the way down to having your system hacked, by someone who pushed crap to a blockchain, for merely sending a typo into your shell should you decide to install this piece of condensed insanity and the suggested shell hack. Null terminated strings and "billion dollar mistakes" are much saner than this.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pfortuny 4y ago

Honestly, the first paragraph cannot be serious and, if it is, I am sorry to say it is delusional (I am judging the text, not the person).

garganzol 4y ago

I like the part where tea is a virtual environment with freedom and everything. I do not like the part where "tea is creating new technologies that will change how open source is funded" with all those buzzwords, NFTs and stuff. Those are totally different problems and I do not want a middle man who sits on both payments and distribution - this is a direct road to an utopian walled garden which it will inevitably become, sooner or later.

unintendedcons 4y ago

People here seem to really hate the blockchaininess of tea. We'll see how it pans out. Had anyone tried registering any packages? I have a toy package on npm, maybe I'll run through the paces

panda_2134 4y ago

I am personally fed up with the brew devs and have switched to nix on my mac instead. The UX of brew is already disgusting, and I don't think a crypto-embedded package manager will be any better.

pxc 4y ago

This is pretty interesting as the first general-purpose package manager outside of the functional package management paradigm to directly complete with Nix in terms of features like ephemeral shell environments and magic shebangs. At a glance, it's not a reimplementation of Nix with a porcelain. It makes no attempt at Nix-like hermeticity; installation of tea itself fails on NixOS with a dynamic linking error. But it also has the strengths one would expect from the creator of Homebrew taking a second stab at general-purpose package management: the documentation and CLI are charming (if incomplete), it's much faster than Homebrew, and it adds capabilities that Homebrew lacks and which are rare outside of the Nix world. As a Nix person, I'm definitely interested to see what tea can achieve and what kind of userbase it ends up attracting. The less strict approach, day-one emphasis on UX, and choice of a 'dumb', commonplace configuration DSL (YAML) for package definitions could certainly incline a lot of people who shy away from Nix to give it a try. I wonder how binary caching and relocatability are solved, given the apparent per-user prefixes in the homedirs. Nix is really blowing up right now, and still has a huge head start in the breadth and usefulness of Nixpkgs. But a competitor like this really vindicates the recent turn towards emphasizing UX and documentation. If Nix developers to get the new CLI and the flakes schema formally released soon, I think we'll be come out ahead even of 'next-gen' efforts from outside the paradigm, like tea. If they don't, it'll be a missed opportunity for our community.