Why is it funny? Homebrew is the de facto standard terminal packaging tool for macOS.
I guess there's nothing stopping me from moving to Homebrew other than familiarity.
Other taps, like homebrew-ffmpeg, offer a ton of options.
The other issue I experienced with homebrew around that time were related to having different versions of openssl installed because I had some old codebase I had to run (and for performance reasons didn't want to use docker). But that's definitely a edge case.
I still use MacPorts for that reason and it is easy enough to create a local portfile for whatever isn't in Macports.
I find this to be the easy way to manage networked development computers.
I love Nix but it probably has too many rough edges for the typical homebrew user.
It's funny because a multi-trillion dollar company can't be bothered to release a native package manager or an official binary repository for their OS after decades of pleading from developers.
It has become a core OS feature. Historically, you see the set of core OS features expand tremendously. Back in the 80’s drawing lines and circles wasn’t even a core OS feature (not on many home computers, and certainly not on early PCs), bit-mapped fonts were third part add-ons for a while, vector-based fonts were an Adobe add-on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Type_Manager), printer drivers were third party, etc.
I think that’s natural. As lower layers become commodities (try making money selling an OS that only manages memory and processes), OS sellers have to add higher layer stuff to their products to make money on them.
As to Sherlocking, big companies cannot do well there in the eyes of “the angry internet”:
- don’t release feature F: “They don’t even support F out of the box. On the competitor’s product, you get that for free”
- release a minimal implementation: “They have F, but it doesn’t do F1, F2, or F3”
- release a fairly full implementation: “Sherlocking!” and/or nitpicking about their engineering choices.