5 ms·

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

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?
        richbell 4y ago
        Rolling updates are the #1 source of "I don't understand why this isn't working anymore, it worked just fine yesterday!" and annoyances when you need a specific package version (n-2) to align with your deployment environment and Homebrew keeps updating to the bleeding edge. (Beggars can't be choosers, etc. — I recognize the utility that Homebrew has provided to millions of people, that doesn't mean I can't mention its problems.)
        woodruffw 4y ago
        It's based on our historical experience maintaining versions (or, at minimum, trying to not change the core DSL such that older formulae continue to work): we get an order of magnitude more requests for updates than requests for older versions, and even fewer specific complaints about breakage. When a particular package (or version) is widely adopted and difficult to migrate away from (like versions of LLVM, Postgres, or Python), we provide `@`-discriminated versions to allow people to migrate at their own pace. If there's a particular formula you want versioned that we don't currently, please open an issue so that we can discuss it!
      - Nicksil 4y ago
        >the majority of its users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling. I haven't met a single software developer who wants this. That's not to say your statement is incorrect -- I have no evidence stating otherwise -- but the idea boggles my mind.
        95014_refugee 4y ago
    - tomjakubowski 4y ago
      Homebrew distrbutes recipes and bottles for older versions of many packages: postgres and node come to mind. And it's easy to maintain your own recipe if you need a different one. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3987683/homebrew-install-specific-version-of-formula/9832084#9832084 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3987683/homebrew-install...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      It's a rolling-release package manager, that's what you get. It's the same with Macports and Pkgsrc.

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?
      - richbell 4y ago
        Rolling updates are the #1 source of "I don't understand why this isn't working anymore, it worked just fine yesterday!" and annoyances when you need a specific package version (n-2) to align with your deployment environment and Homebrew keeps updating to the bleeding edge. (Beggars can't be choosers, etc. — I recognize the utility that Homebrew has provided to millions of people, that doesn't mean I can't mention its problems.)
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        It's based on our historical experience maintaining versions (or, at minimum, trying to not change the core DSL such that older formulae continue to work): we get an order of magnitude more requests for updates than requests for older versions, and even fewer specific complaints about breakage. When a particular package (or version) is widely adopted and difficult to migrate away from (like versions of LLVM, Postgres, or Python), we provide `@`-discriminated versions to allow people to migrate at their own pace. If there's a particular formula you want versioned that we don't currently, please open an issue so that we can discuss it!
    - Nicksil 4y ago
      >the majority of its users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling. I haven't met a single software developer who wants this. That's not to say your statement is incorrect -- I have no evidence stating otherwise -- but the idea boggles my mind.
      - 95014_refugee 4y ago
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Homebrew distrbutes recipes and bottles for older versions of many packages: postgres and node come to mind. And it's easy to maintain your own recipe if you need a different one. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3987683/homebrew-install-specific-version-of-formula/9832084#9832084 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3987683/homebrew-install...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It's a rolling-release package manager, that's what you get. It's the same with Macports and Pkgsrc.