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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

My recollection of the PowerPC Mac era is that compiling anything open-source was fraught with challenges. My system would typically end up with acres of cruft and one-off hacks just to get things to build.

Life's different in 2020: there's Docker and, if you can tolerate the attitude, Homebrew. It should be easier this time around. But I'd be wary of moving to ARM quite yet for anything that requires manual compilation. I'm certainly not going to make the leap until I've seen that other people have successfully built some of the more esoteric parts of the toolchain I use.

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> if you can tolerate the attitude

Maintainer here. Not sure if you’re referring to the way Homebrew is technically implemented, or the maintainers’ attitude.

Either way, what would you prefer us to do better/differently?

The tone taken in Github issues can be really, really hostile. The very first thing a user sees in the issue template is a shouty headline about being blocked. There are many comments which come across to me as passive-aggressive such as https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/5675#issuecomment-46... or the last para at https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/5654#issuecomment-46... .

I appreciate that you have a near-impossible mission in helping diagnose people's installation issues. I don't envy you, and I appreciate the technical work you do. Few open source projects are immune from the challenges of burnout caused by ingrate users and Homebrew probably gets it worse than most. As a maintainer, I 100% get it. But as a user, it puts me off using the software. I now use Homebrew much less than I used to as a result.

I see. Thank you for taking the time to explain and even provide examples. Much appreciated and insightful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make the issue template friendlier while keeping the rate of poorly written reports at an acceptable level. We definitely need to change our approach. Setting a hostile frame in an issue template isn’t helping anyone.

Thanks again for taking your time to explain. We still have a lot to learn and improve.

Wow, really good handling on your part here. Always nice to see how people are able to discuss these things in a productive manner. Thanks for homebrew, made the switch from linux possible for me :) great work.

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For myself, it’s the attitude to system permissions. It really shouldn’t expect a specific user to own anything in particular. MacPorts get this bit right.

> if you can tolerate the attitude, Homebrew.

If you can't, there's MacPorts. It's rock solid, even if not at the bleeding edge of everything.

Yeah, well, Docker doesn't currently work so smoothly on Apple Silicon: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/4733

Which is a bit surprising. Weren't they using HyperKit for virtualization?

The chips that were in the special Developer Transition Kit hardware that developers got over the summer did not support hardware virtualization, so there was no way for the Docker team to test. The M1 chip in the Macs shipping this week has that support, so the Docker team should be able to get things running soon.

Makes a lot of sense. There is no reason HyperKit would fallback to software virtualization when hardware support is not available because it's always been available for supported x86 Macs.

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