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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

>it's a terrible dictatorial piece of software that wants to command precisely how you use your computer

I've also seen examples of where Homebrew is basically dictating on how to release your software as well. There was that one case where they decided to delete the formula for mpv since mpv didn't have a recent enough of a tagged release.

https://github.com/danielbair/homebrew-core/commit/b18f104f1...

There was also an instance with mpv where Homebrew devs got pissy about mpv not supporting Lua 5.3 and mpv devs got angry at Homebrew devs for asking to break existing user scripts to appease one package manager.

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That one doesn't seem unreasonable. They have a "we only support tagged releases" policy. mpv moved away from tagging releases for a bit, and their latest tagged release couldn't build on current MacOS. So they switched it to the part of their system (casks) that supports downloading and installing arbitrary binaries instead.

I think it's a fair conflict, too. For a package manager, saying "just download and compile master wherever it is right now" is rough, and I can understand them not wanting to have to look at mpv's repo and pick a good commit to pin as their "release". Offloading picking a stable release point to someone else is legitimate.

To add to what you said, the formula came back a week and a half later when they returned to tagging releases.

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/82a45025682...

I suppose their hand was probably forced by Apple in some way, but simply offering binary downloads for mpv in particular is subpar. There are a lot of unusual options for mpv that, in my experience, don't get pulled into prebuilt binaries. For instance, last I checked, the prebuilt packages for mpv from homebrew didn't have librubberband support. LibRubberband is great, but to effectively integrate it into your workflow you need some userscripts that mpv doesn't ship with, so many users (including packagers evidently) may not see the value in it. When I was still using MacOS, I had to build mpv myself to enable it. My memory is hazy, but I think libarchive support was in a similar situation. Eventually I cut homebrew out of the picture and chose to build mpv myself, since homebrew wasn't helping at all, just getting in the way.

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