Creator of Homebrew launches new package manager - Tea

“What if web3 crypto bullshit was somehow critical to your software stack?” is one of the funniest horror story prompts I can think of.

Does every great tech success story have to be followed up by crypto prostitution?

i definitely like a lot of what Max and his team are trying to do here

(Absolutely LOVE the idea of specifying dependencies in front matter, no matter the language, and having tea be smart enough to fetch them and then execute your script, though one concern I can see happening are really really long front matter that should really be in Makefiles. that's an edge case though).

i disagree with some of his ideologies (I DEFINITELY don't think Docker sucks for development, for example), but that's minor (as in we can probably amicably argue over Docker sucking or not sucking over a Guinness, but I won't discredit the man over it)

I think using a blockchain for authenticity and package supply chains is really interesting. Probably one of the best use cases for this technology IMO. I actually came into this comment hot to talk down this project based on that alone, but after skimming the whitepaper [1], their ideas make a lot of sense.

I have LONG been needing to completely overhaul my dotfiles. I've used dotfiles to install and set up my computer for 13 years, but they are getting heavy and clumsy as of late. It doesn't help that most of the stuff in my dotfiles assumes a Mac environment (most of the installation logic assumes Homebrew), which is de-facto lock in. I've been looking for something more elegant to replace these with. I'll give Tea a try.

(I was also going to shit on this being written in TypeScript and requiring Node, but it is actually self-contained, which I really like. I was also going to compare it to Nix, but Nix is in C++, which is a huge bummer for mere humans like me who are trying to move AWAY from pointers and memory management issues lol.)

my biggest concern is speculation. given that the entire point of steeping these tokens is to reward active package contributors, i'm concerned about the junk that their chain will get full of when people decide to auto-generate packages to mint as much as possible after the tea token hits like USD$100 each or whatever. it's also unclear to me whether package maintainers get awarded tokens for each version of a package they upload onto the chain.

[1] https://tea.xyz/tea.white-paper.pdf

To clarify, when I first think of new package management I think of something that does reproducible cross platform builds, and something that sounds like rent seeking crypto, is the last thing I will think of.