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Comment by corybrown | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Linux support. I guess that's useful for those times when the OS package manager is out of date? Or is it in order to not run as root?

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It’s very useful when on a remote login where you don’t have root but want more modern software e.g. academic HPC clusters with shared filesystems, which tend to have extremely “conservative” OS versions (we are stuck on RHEL6 for the forseeable future).

I’m not aware of much else that fulfills this niche well - conda seems very very tied to precisely tested version combinations, and (from what I remember - tried and had problems) nix seems to want root/system level daemons.

pkgsrc[1] is portable to most Unix(-like) systems, and can run as a non-privileged user, so that would likely work as well. I'd trust it more than homebrew anyway.

[1]: http://pkgsrc.org/

> I'd trust it more than homebrew anyway.

I'm curious why you feel this way.

> conda seems very very tied to precisely tested version combinations, and (from what I remember - tried and had problems)

Hello. Conda core contributor here. Do you have any more details? Would love to help.

We try to keep version constraints among dependencies as loose as possible. We do actively patch dependency metadata over time, putting upper version bounds on dependencies when incompatibilities eventually arise.

Yes, many maintainers/linuxbrew folk are/were in science/academia. They were tired of logging into HPC system X and needing a certain piece of software. With linuxbrew/homebrew on linux you can just install/build the entire toolchain in user land and get software in your home directory when you don't have root.

I wonder if it builds on Amazon's weird version of Linux they use on EC2 machines by default

I wouldn't recommend it for Fedora since dnf repos are as updated as brew (if not faster) and dep version conflicts are handled better than almost any package manager out there imho.

Why they put stuff under /home/linuxbrew, I don't know. That practice is so unordinary, I refuse to use it.

You can put it under your home folder too. That's the primary use case, I believe: cases where the system is old & crufty and you don't have root.

I believe that brew makes it much easier to support multiple versions of the same package installed simultaneously.

Yes, I like Homebrew's GNU stow - like capabilities of linking stuff in and out of your environment.

A word of warning, however: Homebrew 2.0 removes your old formula from the Cellar when upgrading. If you want to disable this you must set HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP in your environment if you want to hold on to those older versions.

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