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Yes, right now homebrew is specific to Mac OS 10.5+ -- the second paragraph of my original comment is pining for portability, so it could be used on shell accou

by blasdel 17y ago

Yes, right now homebrew is specific to Mac OS 10.5+ -- the second paragraph of my original comment is pining for portability, so it could be used on shell accounts and beyond. A major use case is the ability for your app to be able to pull in it's own sandboxed dependencies in a crossplatform way -- so anyone can develop on their macbook independently of their system is set up, and deploy on any worthwhile server regardless of its setup. gem does a pretty damn good job of this for Ruby libraries, but it doesn't help at all for the native libraries and utilities that the gems are wrappers around :)

silentbicycle 17y ago
Well, there's the Unix distro package system and another repository for Ruby gems and CPAN and LuaRocks and Hackage and ... They keep stepping on each others' toes, but I'm not sure the solution is to add even more mutually incompatible packaging systems. By their nature, they need to see the system (inc. what dependencies are available) as a whole to be really useful, and fragmenting that picture makes the situation worse for all involved. (On second reading, it looks like it's designed to try to work with CPAN et al, so that's an improvement.) It would be nice if it actually worked, but coming up with a perfectly portable global packaging system would be hard enough if it was working across platforms for one vendor, let alone the big mob that is the open source world.