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I’ve posted a variant of this answer on other threads about Homebrew, but to summarize: 1. Homebrew is entirely maintained by open source contributors. Keeping
by woodruffw 3y ago
I’ve posted a variant of this answer on other threads about Homebrew, but to summarize:
1. Homebrew is entirely maintained by open source contributors. Keeping thousands of packages up to date is a significant task even before considering maintaining the packaging core itself, and analytics serve as both a warning system and hard data for package importance, instability, etc.
2. Homebrew is somewhat unique among package managers because of its relationship with the host OS: it has no say over how macOS behaves, and needs to adapt quickly to changes made unilaterally by Apple. Analytics help detect that kind of top-down breakage.
FD: Current member of Homebrew, former maintainer.
- heywoodlh 3y agoHomebrew is one of those tools that actually makes MacOS a decent Unix workstation for engineering (often, it feels like in spite of Apple). Without brew, MacOS would not be an OS I would even consider for my personal machines -- but I really enjoy MacOS now that it's on the M1/M2. Although, admittedly, I use Nix-Darwin to manage my Homebrew apps. Thanks for your contributions to Homebrew :)
- woodruffw 3y agoThank you for your kind words! The maintainers deserve nearly all of the credit; these days, I mostly just do a bit of security automation stuff and defend their work when it comes up here :-)
- vin047 3y agoUsed to feel this way until I discovered MacPorts. So much faster than brew and prefer it placing everything in /opt and not relying on system binaries. Now I only use homebrew to manage Casks and a few esoteric binaries (really rare).
- alwillis 3y agobrew on Apple Silicon Macs also install everything in /opt.