4 ms·

Given homebrew was strictly worse than the tool it displaced, I’m not sure it’s the right question to ask. MacOS package management is strictly marketing based.

user82747493 2y ago
That’s not fair. Homebrew has been fantastic. It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?
- StopDisinfo910 2y ago
  They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience. (Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)
    - StopDisinfo910 2y ago
      Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity. Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        > Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. I can't find these anywhere on the official blog, which goes back to the first 1.0 release of Homebrew. Links would be helpful.
      - Lammy 2y ago
        Found it because I was curious: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e75170a6c0eaebda4d701b46f1acf446 https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e... Here are the comparisons to other package managers: > Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win. vs MacPorts registry which used its own homebrewed (lol) Receipts files in 2009, and now uses a SQLite DB: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#internals.registry.files https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#i... > I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink). vs MacPorts installs to `/opt/local` as root. > Why Not MacPorts? > ================= > 1. MacPorts installs its own libz, its own openssl, etc. It is an autarky. > This makes no sense to me. OS X comes with all that shit. > 2. MacPorts support Tiger, and PPC. We don't, so things are better optimised. There is no “Why Not Fink?” section. And because I didn't know the word autarky: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky
        woodruffw 2y ago
        From 2009, so before my involvement. I'll note that this also says a bunch of things that aren't true in current-day Homebrew (Casks, for example, are distributions of .app bundles), so I think it'd be accurate to say that it doesn't reflect the project's current (or even past-decade) views.
        frumplestlatz 2y ago
        Things improved a lot as homebrew relearned the design constraints and reasons why MacPorts made the decisions they did, and wound up adopting many of the same solutions. It was frustrating in the beginning to see so much marketing-driven shade being thrown from an ill-informed position. Obviously that wasn’t you or the current maintainers of homebrew, and things have improved tremendously, but that’s the era from which frustration like the grandparent post originates.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cstrahan 2y ago
  > It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”? I don’t think you are being fair. This question presupposes that the supposed problems can be solved by iterative changes, rather than being inherent in the chosen design/architecture of the software, which usually requires complete replacement thereof (as well as the leadership thereof, as people who choose poor solutions to problems often can’t appreciate arguments for superior solutions). (Not that I’m trying to suggest that I agree that homebrew in particular is bad — just speaking generally.)
  - user82747493 2y ago
    Then fork it! Make a new or better one! Handwaving it’s not good does nothing for anyone
    - cstrahan 1y ago
      People share negative sentiments for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s emotionally motivated (like venting), sometimes it’s because you want to see less hype and more realistic discourse are about the deficiencies in our industry. There simply isn’t enough time to fix all the things that are problematic or completely broken, so naturally some things are only going to be talked about, rather than worked on. And, I’ll point out the irony in your directive: you take issue with people expressing criticism without taking action to completely resolve the respective issue, and then you come along to express criticism by tell people to not complain but instead offer up free labor, when you could go and solve the problem that resulted in the original complaint.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lxe 2y ago
Macports was less ergonomic imho, which caused the community to shift to homebrew.
- cls59 2y ago
  This. There is plenty to dislike about Ruby, but it is exceptionally strong at implementing domain specific languages. Homebrew was able to use that to lower the barrier to packaging software. Also, using Git + GitHub instead of SVN + Trac was absolutely a winning pick for scaling project participation back in the 2000s.
- Lammy 2y ago
  Everybody forgot about Fink https://www.finkproject.org/doc/users-guide/index.php https://www.finkproject.org/doc/users-guide/index.php https://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/index.php?phpLang=en https://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/index.php?phpLang=en (Not a recommendation; seems pretty dead)
  - int_19h 2y ago
    There's also pkgsrc.
- frollogaston 2y ago
  Mainly cause there's no curl | bash way to install :D and also it wants you to update it each time you update macOS, which iirc requires a reboot too I still use MacPorts though
whalesalad 2y ago
back in the day macports was a fucking nightmare. homebrew may not be perfect but it is popular for good reason.
jrochkind1 2y ago
At the time I switched from macports to homebrew (years ago?), homebrew could install more things I needed without any errors. Many more. That was it, that's why I switched, nothing more, nothing less.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  This is why I switched as well. At that point the brew experience was a lot closer to that of apt on a Debian-based Linux distribution or something where you could reliably run “x install <pkgname>”, get up to go grab coffee, and come back to a useable newly installed package. Macports felt like it could throw errors because Venus was in retrograde sometimes.
anarticle 2y ago
Not sure why the subtweet, but I'll guess it was macports, which in my experience was not as fun or easy as brew.
frollogaston 2y ago
MacPorts is still around, and that's what I use.

user82747493 2y ago

That’s not fair. Homebrew has been fantastic. It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

StopDisinfo910 2y ago
They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience. (Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)
  - StopDisinfo910 2y ago
    Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity. Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      > Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. I can't find these anywhere on the official blog, which goes back to the first 1.0 release of Homebrew. Links would be helpful.
    - Lammy 2y ago
      Found it because I was curious: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e75170a6c0eaebda4d701b46f1acf446 https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e... Here are the comparisons to other package managers: > Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win. vs MacPorts registry which used its own homebrewed (lol) Receipts files in 2009, and now uses a SQLite DB: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#internals.registry.files https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#i... > I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink). vs MacPorts installs to `/opt/local` as root. > Why Not MacPorts? > ================= > 1. MacPorts installs its own libz, its own openssl, etc. It is an autarky. > This makes no sense to me. OS X comes with all that shit. > 2. MacPorts support Tiger, and PPC. We don't, so things are better optimised. There is no “Why Not Fink?” section. And because I didn't know the word autarky: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        From 2009, so before my involvement. I'll note that this also says a bunch of things that aren't true in current-day Homebrew (Casks, for example, are distributions of .app bundles), so I think it'd be accurate to say that it doesn't reflect the project's current (or even past-decade) views.
        frumplestlatz 2y ago
        Things improved a lot as homebrew relearned the design constraints and reasons why MacPorts made the decisions they did, and wound up adopting many of the same solutions. It was frustrating in the beginning to see so much marketing-driven shade being thrown from an ill-informed position. Obviously that wasn’t you or the current maintainers of homebrew, and things have improved tremendously, but that’s the era from which frustration like the grandparent post originates.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cstrahan 2y ago
> It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”? I don’t think you are being fair. This question presupposes that the supposed problems can be solved by iterative changes, rather than being inherent in the chosen design/architecture of the software, which usually requires complete replacement thereof (as well as the leadership thereof, as people who choose poor solutions to problems often can’t appreciate arguments for superior solutions). (Not that I’m trying to suggest that I agree that homebrew in particular is bad — just speaking generally.)
- user82747493 2y ago
  Then fork it! Make a new or better one! Handwaving it’s not good does nothing for anyone
  - cstrahan 1y ago
    People share negative sentiments for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s emotionally motivated (like venting), sometimes it’s because you want to see less hype and more realistic discourse are about the deficiencies in our industry. There simply isn’t enough time to fix all the things that are problematic or completely broken, so naturally some things are only going to be talked about, rather than worked on. And, I’ll point out the irony in your directive: you take issue with people expressing criticism without taking action to completely resolve the respective issue, and then you come along to express criticism by tell people to not complain but instead offer up free labor, when you could go and solve the problem that resulted in the original complaint.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lxe 2y ago

Macports was less ergonomic imho, which caused the community to shift to homebrew.

cls59 2y ago
This. There is plenty to dislike about Ruby, but it is exceptionally strong at implementing domain specific languages. Homebrew was able to use that to lower the barrier to packaging software. Also, using Git + GitHub instead of SVN + Trac was absolutely a winning pick for scaling project participation back in the 2000s.
Lammy 2y ago
Everybody forgot about Fink https://www.finkproject.org/doc/users-guide/index.php https://www.finkproject.org/doc/users-guide/index.php https://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/index.php?phpLang=en https://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/index.php?phpLang=en (Not a recommendation; seems pretty dead)
- int_19h 2y ago
  There's also pkgsrc.
frollogaston 2y ago
Mainly cause there's no curl | bash way to install :D and also it wants you to update it each time you update macOS, which iirc requires a reboot too I still use MacPorts though

whalesalad 2y ago

back in the day macports was a fucking nightmare. homebrew may not be perfect but it is popular for good reason.

jrochkind1 2y ago

At the time I switched from macports to homebrew (years ago?), homebrew could install more things I needed without any errors. Many more. That was it, that's why I switched, nothing more, nothing less.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago
This is why I switched as well. At that point the brew experience was a lot closer to that of apt on a Debian-based Linux distribution or something where you could reliably run “x install <pkgname>”, get up to go grab coffee, and come back to a useable newly installed package. Macports felt like it could throw errors because Venus was in retrograde sometimes.

anarticle 2y ago

Not sure why the subtweet, but I'll guess it was macports, which in my experience was not as fun or easy as brew.

frollogaston 2y ago

MacPorts is still around, and that's what I use.