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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

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2bitencryption·

does homebrew still* use Github as the store for all packages?

Just curious, that always seemed like a strange scenario.

* or am I wrong that it ever did?

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"Packages" in homebrew are nothing more than Ruby install files called Formulas[1]. So using Github works really well for their use case and I don't think there is any thought of changing it. Updating homebrew, new formulas, etc, is nothing more than a `git pull`.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/tree/master/Formul...

Not quite. They also supply precompiled binaries nowadays, one version of each supported macOS version. They have a CI infrastructure that continuously builds precompiled binaries for all formulas, for all supported macOS versions.

Right, those binaries are hosted in Bintray (http://homebrew.bintray.com/)

Is there any facilities for mirroring this or this "belongs" to bintray? Torrents, magnet links, rsync server or something like that.

You would think `wget` for building your own mirror would work fine but no, http://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/ returns "Forbidden", probably because the directory listing is too large.

There is an environment variable you can set to force building from source if you do not want to rely on bottled binaries.

They moved their heavy stuff to bintray, which is a better fit.

I don't know about homebrew, but Nix does (not binaries, though).

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

Both Cocoapods and Homebrew are pretty big on github. The previous cocoapods article comments mention this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652

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