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Comment by selkin | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew sure has room for improvement, as most software does, and I appreciate every effort to replace and renew what we have with something better. But my own grievances with Homebrew isn't with the codebase itself.

What discourages me from using Homebrew is the intent and the mindset of its developers and packagers, who, I think, see their goal building an "unstable" distribution, as Debian defines it: "[a distribution that] is run by developers and those who like to live on the edge".

I am not blaming the Homebrew developers for building a Sid rather than Bookworm. Some people want just that. Heck, I used to run Debian Sid myself, but have lost my patience for maintaining my own computers since: I am kept busy enough by fixing the software I write, I don't want to spend more time fixing software I did not.

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I mainly disagree with the Homebrew stance on sudo/root. They claim it's better to install everything under a user dir, but 10% of the time that doesn't work for whatever reason, and tons of users have screwed up their permissions trying to fix it. No other package manager has this issue.

I am not too fond of this design for reasons of privilege separation and FHS-alignment, but can accept it as most Homebrew users don't have their Macintosh computers used by multiple people.

My machine is single-user, problem is some things require root. Maybe they shouldn't according to Homebrew's stance on permissions, but idk, I'm working with what I've got.

Can you give a concrete example?

I know why certain software has be run with root privileges, but it's a bit hard for me to come with a reasonable scenario where a software would fail to run properly when installed to a directory that is owned by the same non-root user that launches that software.

The symptom was something like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16432071/how-to-fix-home... , which btw has a terrible accepted answer. I forget the root cause (no pun intended), possibly some bad interaction with stuff I installed outside of Homebrew. It's also possible I did something wrong, but even then there's something to be said about so many users having the same problem uniquely with Homebrew.

Lemme try to repro again when I'm home.

this kind of errors are quite common with Homebrew in my experience. if you did anything "wrong", then it's something really easy to do wrong which lots of other (me included) have done wrong at some point, and that the software should help to prevent

Digging through it more, it seems like Homebrew didn't play nice with anything else that used that dir. Maybe it's less of a problem now that it installs to /opt/homebrew, but I imagine there are still times Homebrew needs to place files in root-owned dirs or next to them.

This issue is also brought up in the Github commit posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43766371 "I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink)."

My Macs aren’t used by multiple people but they are multi-user systems. At minimum I have work and personal accounts, often project-specific accounts too. Homebrew is really bad at this and I was hoping anything that came along to replace it would do better. All the similar tools like APT etc. can handle this, it’s such a pain that Homebrew makes it difficult.

And it's multi-user in a way even if you only have one account, cause the other account is root, and some stuff besides Homebrew will install as root.

I would've been alright if they actually installed stuff in a user dir under the user's home folder, but it's insane to have a system-wide /opt/homebrew owned by whatever user happened to run the installer. Very icky.

It is possible to install Homebrew itself and the software it packages under your home folder[0], though that configuration is not officially supported.

This is how I install Homebrew when I have to, and so far the only issue I ran into is that binary packages are often tagged as installable only to Homebrew's default folder, so Homebrew had to built the to-be-installed software from source instead, resulting in it taking longer and the computer fans spinning louder.

[0] https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere-unsupported

If I understand correctly, running a Debian-style stable repo would essentially require forking all distributed software and backporting security fixes to them.

With many macOS users coming from a different communities than Debian users, I really wonder how well that would go over with the folks whose software was being distributed.

Caveat lector, as I didn't collect the data to back this, but I would be extremeley surprised to find more than a few dozen of non-cask packages in Homebrew that contain Macintosh only software.

There are rolling distros on Linux that are remarkably stable. My current Linux distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed is one. And on macOS you already have an immutable system partition that provides a stable base to build on top of, so I fail to see the value proposition of a package manager on macOS that's deliberately slow.

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