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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew barely works. I dread messing with it. It's not Homebrew's fault: with Macs the stars have to align to get things to work much of the time. I find that the origin OS for most of my libraries (Linux/Debian) is much more reliable than a Mac. I had some issues switching away from a mac at first, but I got over them.

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> Homebrew barely works. I dread messing with it.

One of us must be smoking something. I've never had a more reliable/friendly package manager (among apt-get, pacman, macports, pkg_add, yum).

Brew works great most of the times and it is indeed very human friendly. The problem sometimes arises when you need to install something a little bit more exotic than usual (eg. graph-tool was my last case) in that case lot of things can go wrong.

Maybe the experience depends on what packages you install?

It is hard to say, because the grandparent says that Homebrew barely works without providing any examples of the problems they have ran into.

Yeah as long as you're using what everyone else is using and stay "inside the lines" it's OK. But step off into special territory, you're better off on Linux.

Wild guess: people who keep Xcode and its associated command line tools up to date have smooth experiences. Those who don't, do not.

Brew recently started refusing to install anything if your xcode is out of date, and forces you to wait for a "brew update" if it hasn't updated in 24 hours. It's actually hideously user-unfriendly, but it probably saves the devs a lot of stupid github issues.

Unless you made the mistake of upgrading to Xcode 8 while staying with El Capitan and then wondering, why nothing works.

What specifically doesn't work?

It's working for me but I would love to have an example of breakage to take to my IT as another reason they should allow the company machines to be updated.

The only time I remember having a problem with Homebrew is in the summer where I'll run some beta version of the new macOS on a testing machine while trying to use Homebrew which does not support the beta. Other than that it never fails for me, and I install a boat load of tools through Homebrew. I even install as much of my GUI tools as possible using brew cask.

Parallel universes with opposite realities: proven!

What's forcing you to use Homebrew? You could easily use pkgsrc or Nix.

The problem absolutely is Homebrew.

It's better to substantiate allegations. Causes people to take you more seriously.

Homebrew is a "package manager" that has worse dependency management than a ham sandwich and a community that reacts to criticism with "don't talk to us, you're being negative".

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