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Ask HN: Homebrew for Linux?

• grumps 13y ago
  Why wouldn't you use the package manager that your distro comes with?
  • coherentpony 13y ago
    This is exactly the same question I had.
  • hrkristian 13y ago
    I'm limited by my phone atm, but does this thing have a GUI? Using Arch I'm in love with Pacman and AUR, and apt and the other package managers are great/just fine too. They aren't exactly hard to learn so the only way I see Homebrew being needed is if it provides a great GUI with more accessible depth compared to existing alternatives.
    • zalew 13y ago
      > I'm limited by my phone atm, but does this thing have a GUI? apt has synaptic
    • grumps 13y ago
      If you're going to run Arch then you should really stick with being comfortable with the CLI. There's no telling when something will break the upstream GUI packages, or something wont load on boot and you're stuck in single user mode.
    • chc 13y ago
      Homebrew for Mac doesn't, so it would be odd for this one to.
• rpedela 13y ago
  On Ubuntu or Debian? Use apt-get. On RedHat or CentOS? Use yum. Homebrew replicates the behaviour of Linux package managers for Mac.
  • wglb 13y ago
    I agree, but homebrew replicates only a small part of that the linux package managers do.
• susi22 13y ago
  If you need the most packages and the quickest then you should use ARCH linux. Otherwise use your package manager (like others have pointed out)
• cobookman 13y ago
  The linux package managers are significantly better than homebrew/macports. If you're using Debian or a distro based off of Debian (Ubuntu, CrunchBang, ...etc) then you can use apt-get or aptitude. If you're using redhat or a distro based off of redhat (Centos, ClearOS, Fedora) then you use the yum package manager. Finally you have arch linux which uses pacman and yaourt (for non-official packages).
  • emeraldd 13y ago
    If you really want to build from source, there is always Gentoo as well.
    • Argorak 13y ago
      portage also supports custom packages in additional port trees similar to homebrew.
  • dljsjr 13y ago
    I disagree with the first sentence: > The linux package managers are significantly better than homebrew/macports I think homebrew has an infinitely better UI than apt-get (I use both OS X and Ubuntu full-time at work, OS X and Arch at home). Where the Linux package managers are better is stability; homebrew doesn't have rigid enough testing practices to support the aggressiveness in which they update packages. But that falls on the devs and not the tool. EDIT: It seems that people think I meant "GUI" when I said UI. I strictly meant User Interface; in this case, the command line is the front-end to the user interface. I feel that homebrew has a better CLI than things like apt-get or pacman.
    • cobookman 13y ago
      After using os x for a bit w/homebrew, I'd sum it up like this: OS X has a design philosophy of simplicity for the average user. Putting commom settings into guis, and having the more complex ones in terminal. Homebrew follows this. Its great for installing, removing, and searching, but if you want to do something complex have fun. Desktop Linux distros caters to the power user. Its idea is why have lots of GUIs which hide the 'advanced configuration', and instead uses command line. Lots of UX design has gone into these commands to insure that they remain simple enough. Finally windows on the other hand decided to avoid the terminal at all costs. They decided to put every single setting into a gui with little consideration on what the 'average' user will use.
• clizzin 13y ago
  Actually, package managers are core to most Linux distributions! That's been the case long before there was ever Homebrew for OS X. You should almost never have to manually install from source if you're installing anything relatively well-known. If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, you should use the APT package manager. A good tutorial can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto If you're Fedora or Red Hat, you should use yum, which a tool for the RPM package manager. Here is a list of basic yum commands: http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumCommands http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumCommands You can find more explanations/tutorials if you search using queries like "apt tutorial ubuntu" or "yum tutorial red hat." Hope you get acquainted quickly! This might raise the question: Why make Homebrew work on Linux if other package managers exist already and work really well? I can think of a couple reasons: 1) fun experimentation, and 2) the fact that Homebrew formulas are Ruby code, which many people find more approachable to write than APT or RPM packages. My opinion is that it would be fun to see Homebrew on Linux, but it's not necessary given that existing package managers work very well, and many developers are willing to do the work of packaging for the rest of us.
• kevinxucs 13y ago
  I use linuxbrew to manage installations under my home directory because I don't have root privilege. And I found that quite useful. But if you have root privilege, there is no reason not to use package manager provided by the distro.
• aktau 13y ago
  Though I agree that in most cases package managers fulfill this need perfectly well, there are cases in which homebrew does provide something unique. Which is the reason that I contributed a tiny bit to linuxbrew (reporting bugs and suggesting fixes). 1) You need the newest version (ffmpeg for example is something that is often out of date on linux distros, or what about the latest and greatest gcc or llvm, or...) 2) Your distro doesn't have it as a package. Case in point, debian (wheezy) doesn't have ag (the silver searcher). After getting some issues fixed on linuxbrew, I was able to do "brew install ag" on my debian an there it was, a fresh silver surfer. So I don't agree with most posters claiming or implying that homebrew for linux is useless. The closest (and arguably better) you can get is either Archlinux or Gentoo (of which I prefer Arch, which I used for a long time), but if you don't have free choice of distro, linuxbrew gets you quite far.
• agj 13y ago
  It's not clear if you are asking about Homebrew or Macports. If you're asking for a Linux wrapper around Macports, I think you've found it. If you're asking for a cross-platform build system, NetBSD's pkgsrc (http://pkgsrc.org http://pkgsrc.org) supports Linux -- though there is no pkgsrc Homebrew equivalent that I know of.
• leoh 13y ago
  The best feature of homebrew, in my opinion, is that it doesn't require sudo for installation of any package -- in fact, it complains if you try to install something with sudo. Contrast that, say, with npm -g. Most npm -g installs will fail without su, unless you are willing to spend a half hour reconfiguring where dependencies install--pretty fucked in my opinion, as you could potentially install something really nasty. Now, many package managers like apt-get use curated databases for their packages. But in my view, this just is not enough. Homebrew's respect of the user's system is just superior.
  • mekishizufu 13y ago
    > Contrast that, say, with npm -g. Most npm -g installs will fail without su, unless you are willing to spend a half hour reconfiguring where dependencies install--pretty fucked in my opinion, as you could potentially install something really nasty. It's actually not that bad. You can tell npm where to install "global" packages in the .npmrc file: prefix = /home/foouser/npmlocal and then just add the bin sub-directory into your $PATH. > Now, many package managers like apt-get use curated databases for their packages. But in my view, this just is not enough. Homebrew's respect of the user's system is just superior. Agreed. This matters even more as a lot of packages are available only through PPAs.
• laveur 13y ago
  I personally don't see this useful at all for Linux... however I see this replacing ports on most BSD based systems. Its definitely more modern and easier to maintain. I use homebrew for my Mac's but for all my linux systems I use apt/yum depending on the system. I see no reason to use anything else on them.
• Gnewt 13y ago
  More power to them, but I'm not sure why they're doing this. Pretty much every package manager included in current distributions is more useful than Homebrew. Homebrew only exists to patch a package manager into a system that isn't built with one.
• ajdecon 13y ago
  I don't particularly like homebrew compared to the Linux distro package managers, but I have found it convenient for messing around on my Macbook due to the large existing library. A couple of other interesting projects in the Linux software installation space, which I have been using recently: * fpm ("Effing Package Management"): https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki Can be used to generate deb or rpm packages given a source directory or existing package of various types. (For example, generate an RPM from a Rubygem.) I use this frequently to quickly create distro packages from software which only has source available, then put them in a yum repository on S3 for my private projects. (Creating package repositories is so easy, and signing them isn't much harder. It's really worth doing.) * EasyBuild: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild EasyBuild automates building software from source, and provides a framework for automating a variety of complex build processes. It's targeted at high-performance scientific computing, where many of the applications have arcane or bizarre build processes, and includes modules for a huge variety of scientific apps. The big advantage (IMO) is that EasyBuild integrates with Environment Modules [1], which makes it easy to work with many different versions of the same software side-by-side. EB doesn't put everything in the same tree; each package is installed into its own directory and Environment Modules is used to manage the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc. "module load hdf5/1.8.11" and you're good. I use it extensively both on my laptop and on some of the compute clusters I manage, where users frequently need to be able to switch library and application versions quickly and easily. One workflow I've been experimenting with recently: Use EasyBuild to build and install all packages into locations in /opt on a dev machine, then use fpm to package them and upload into my repo. Reproduce the system by installing the relevant packages from yum, and still get the flexibility of using Environment Modules. [1] http://modules.sourceforge.net/ http://modules.sourceforge.net/
  • aktau 13y ago
    Exactly! For anything were I have to deploy, I currently use FPM which you mentioned together with freight (https://github.com/rcrowley/freight https://github.com/rcrowley/freight) to generate a debian apt repository. Just serve the resulting folder with nginx/apache/... and you're good to go. It also signs the packages.
• ccanassa 13y ago
  The problem with apt-get for my use case is that most packages are outdated. If I need to install the latest version of a package I have to Google for instructions which is quite annoying. e.g. these are the steps to install Node.js: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nodejs https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager#ubuntu-mint-elementary-os https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-p...