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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Code is reusable data, and regardless of language is much more useful than an arbitrary data format. There was an attempt to port homebrew to linux, but it didn't go far.

dotCloud has just open-sourced Docker[1], an attempt at solving the deployment issue.

[1] http://docker.io

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> There was an attempt to port homebrew to linux, but it didn't go far.

Linux already has more package managers than you can shake a stick at. To gain traction on linux, homebrew would have to offer useful features that other package managers don't have. Even then, people are more likely to copy the features into an existing linux package manager.

I don't think people tend to shop around when it comes to package managers; you use whatever your distro provides. If it sucks, you find a better distro or submit patches, depending how involved you are.

I don't know why anyone would want Homebrew on Linux anyway. The whole point of it is that OS X is a mostly-serviceable UNIX without a decent package manager. So if you have a handful of UNIX packages you just want a lightweight way to install them using the system headers where applicable.

But if you need to install tons of stuff the cracks start to show, because you have no conflict resolution or sophisticated versioning. Linux leans heavily on its package managers, so I just don't see what Homebrew has to offer.

Homebrew formulas are much more frequently up-to-date than other package managers due to the crowd-sourced pull-request updates - there isn't a package mantainer that has to do all the work. Formulas are straight-forward and don't have a million conditionals for different system configurations (this would be hard to maintain on linux). These two things already make it much more pleasant to use than apt-get/yum/pacman.

Homebrew seems more akin to Arch's PKGBUILD or Gentoo's ebuilds than other package managers.

Yes, I am familiar with homebrew and use it every day including submitting pull requests back. However you missed the point of my comment. The point is, it's more pleasant until you run into a conflict which existing Linux version managers tend to handle much better (out of experience and necessity). At that threshold of complexity you need something more sophisticated than homebrew to avoid pulling your hair out. OS X benefits from a certain homogeneity that puts homebrew in a sweet spot.

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