4 ms·
Ask HN: What is bad about Homebrew?
I've seen a number of comments characterizing homebrew, the package manager, as bad but it was usually in an offhand way.
The most annoying thing I've come across recently is that one can't downgrade to an old version (unless there's a specific formula). Htop 3.4. shows CPU usage 40x too small (on macOS) and to fix that I can't use brew.
- worldsavior 2y agoAnnoying CLI; the things called "casks"; the annoying behavior of updating ALL the packages on your system when installing only one program; and bad handling of broken packages.
- f30e3dfed1c9 2y agoI found all the beer-related terminology -- cask, keg, rack, Cellar, Caskroom, tap, bottle -- annoying and unhelpful and immediately disliked it back when it was new. I did use it a little for a while but not in a long time. These days I use pkgin, which I like fine. Can't think offhand of when something I wanted wasn't available there. My impression is that homebrew has many more packages available, but apparently not any that I want.
- apineda 2y agoI've been a light user for ~5 years maybe? Never really had issues, it's convenient, if a little obtuse relative to say npm install -g.
- runjake 2y agoIt's not perfect, but I like it fine. I definitely like it better than Fink and DarwinPorts, though those may be technically superior. It's not super simple, but for your htop example, you could probably do something like the following: # Create a new tap brew tap-new $USER/local-tap # Extract the specific version you want brew extract --version=X.Y.Z htop $USER/local-tap # Install the extracted version brew install htop@X.Y.Z I'm keeping an eye on the unofficial successor by the original author of Homebrew: https://pkgx.dev/ https://pkgx.dev/
- croemer 2y agoThanks, that almost worked, needed the following (extra --force tap of core and link --overwrite) brew tap-new $USER/local-tap brew tap homebrew/core --force brew extract --version=3.3.0 htop $USER/local-tap brew install $USER/local-tap/cmake@3.3.0 brew link --overwrite htop@3.3.0 Based mostly on https://www.ericbariaux.com/posts/brew_rollback/ https://www.ericbariaux.com/posts/brew_rollback/
- runjake 2y agoThanks. I appreciate the correction!
- cpach 2y agoI’ve used it since ~2013. IMHO it works very well. (Have rarely had the need to downgrade anything.)