I switched to using Nix on macOS to manage packages, and it's fantastic. The nix concept in general is wonderful, and there's a lot of work put in to making it work well on the mac. I haven't missed `brew` at all.
What are the differences wrt to security?
1. It's language, Nix, is limited in scope?
2. No automated PR merge workflows (yet)?
3. Better community/engineering/security?
The longer answer is about the inherent benefits of the nix way of doing things; it is a horse of a different color compared to all other package managers I've seen or heard about. It is a different installation paradigm, and the nix documentation (and many blog posts) do a better job of describing its main differences than I can here.
Deterministic builds as a first class feature is probably the shortest summary. Being able to reference an entire and exact hash tree of deps is hugely valuable.
With consent, it's fine to send it anywhere they like.
Their analytics are also unauthenticated. I sort of want to make the first letter of each package in the top packages ranking spell out something funny.
It includes a persistent unique identifier, generated on install, a sort of Homebrew supercookie for tracking you across months or years until you wipe your OS install.
It also includes the client IP address (because you can't make an HTTP connection without transmitting that). The fact that Homebrew doesn't see this information doesn't mean it's not transmitted (to Google). This leaks your city-level location.
These two things permit Google to assemble a rough location tracklog based on client IP geolocation (correlated via the unique install ID), along with which packages you installed. Google, as we know, spies for the US federal government.
You're missing the point here, though: even if it were totally anonymous (which, as I've pointed out, it's not): it's still unethical malware even in that case because it's private data transmitted without consent. The fact that you don't consider your usage data private is fine; others do and transmitting that from their systems without consent is abuse.
I mentioned that it's unauthenticated to point out that there's literally nothing stopping anyone on the whole internet from polluting the dataset with whatever bogus information they want. I wouldn't undertake this myself, but it's entirely in-bounds for an organization that feels entitled to co-opt your private computer to conduct surveillance on you without your consent. It's a public API, after all.
Please mind that knowing unique installs will remain important for us though. We have zero interest in tracking people but we do need meaningful install counts. Those numbers have been super helpful for making decisions, for example which packages are worth maintainers’ time and which aren’t.
You're shipping unethical malware. Making the data more private, switching analytics platforms, doing IP scrubbing... it doesn't change the ethical issue at all. You're stealing data without the consent of the subject/generator of that data.
What you're doing is illegal in medicine, for example.
> Creating a Nix Store volume... error: refusing to create Nix store volume because the boot volume is FileVault encrypted, but encryption-at-rest is not available. Manually create a volume for the store and re-run this script. See https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sect-macos-installation
The provided link doesn’t really tell me what to do...? Why are there so many (complicated) ways to install this thing, and why can’t it do it automatically?
They do explain why they chose this option, and provide you with others (each with its own disadvantages). Nix seems to be the arch of package managers.
- if you have an M1 mac, it does not work (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/95903)
- if you have an intel mac, when you install it, you have to add the "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" switch to the installer, otherwise it does not work (https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#sect-macos-installation). i do not want unencrypted things on may computer. (and yes, there is a long section of the documentation about other approaches with other tradeoffs, and if you have a T2 chip then maybe it is ok (but why isn't the installer detecting this automatically?)... the point is, with homebrew there is no such problem)
There is nix, the language/package manager which can be used standalone; nixpkgs, the ports or homebrew like repo of packages that can be built/run on many systems including macOS; and nixos, the Linux+Nix distro that puts it all together.