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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system.

Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage.

What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...

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It's been five years for my data point, but every single time it came time to update brew, I hit something else I'd never seen before. Every time, it broke.

And from what I can see, migrations are still causing issues. [0]

[0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/19951

Crazy, what kind of set up were you trying to do there? Been using it for probably 10 years and I can't remember the last time I had an issue and I run updates on it automatically every day. Biggest problem I remember is having to chown a directory again or something.

It usually hit, when a dependency of programs gets shoved out into cask. The moment where that happens, and where the things listing it as a dependency realise its now cask and not the main repo, is not altogether in sync.

Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.

I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.

Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.

The trick for smooth experience is to treat it like `pacman -Syu`:

  brew update && brew upgrade && brew autoremove && brew cleanup && brew doctor

Running this every few days and fixing everything that it explicitly complains about kept me issue-free for the last 10 years or so.

Interesting, thank you. That makes sense, but it is not convenient IMO.

I guess it could just be a cron job

I wouldn't recommend doing it from a cronjob, there are sometimes things that require sudo to update, breaking changes and important notes from Brew maintainers in the output. It's really important to inspect the output in order to see everything Brew doesn't consider normal.

Lately I'm running this like once every 2-3 weeks and it's still surprisingly nice to use. The problems only really manifest when you never run this "maintenance" snippet and only use the `brew install`, which will attempt to do the housekeeping stuff when you want/expect it the least.

The one issue I had was creating a new admin user for a client project (so I can just package everything created for that client neatly) and then immediately run into permissions issue. After that, I installed macports and never looked back (other than checking formula for installation guidance for some package).

When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.

Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.

I also used to use Macports exclusively (and Fink before that!). For me the reason behind the switch, after resisting it a long time, was simple: everything I used from Macports was also in Homebrew, but I just kept running into things I wanted to install that were in Homebew but not in Macports.

> Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

Macports comes up all the time, just like you've mentioned it here. It has a few user friendly benefits (no sudo, more up-to-date apps, better gui clients, slightly easier to add custom package, etc), but in general hard to say exactly why one app wins

This comment matches my experience precisely

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621441

Also, I can never internalize its nomenclature: formula, cask, tap, bottle… makes no sense to me.

Yeah, homebrew works so well for me I also use it on Linux. In fact, its growing support for Linux/arm means I'm no longer stuck with Arch ARM VMs and can get up to date dev tooling in any Linux arm distro

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