This is the work of Jonathan Perkin (from joyent): http://www.perkin.org.uk/
It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.
It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.
Why use OSX, then? Shouldn't you be using Gentoo?
Give it a try, you might like it (because it rocks!)
And that's a problem?
I would argue that it's a feature. Due to Homebrew being written in Ruby, it has easily allowed over 4,000 contributors [1]. Recipes are easy to read and inspect for verification purposes.
What is the advantage of C over Ruby?
[1](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/graphs/contributors)
At least, not using /usr/local myself, I see a lot of packages building because they have detected I changed the base directory.
Apart from time, compiling software consumes energy, decreasing the autonomy of my laptop.
But those are not the main reasons I dislike homebrew so much. My main gripe is that the packages are of extremely poor quality. When I needed something, it was not compiled with the options I needed. E.g. packages were missing DTrace integration, QEMU was missing the one target I cared about etc.
I am a Go developer; you have no idea how many problems people have had with the homebrew package. It is garbage. And Go is quite trivial to package compared to other stuff. I simply gave up on helping anyone reporting a problem if he is using homebrew. I ask them to recompile Go from official source first.
And then there's the whole curl into bash things, gah I'll just stop now.
The biggest advantage of pkgsrc (apart from quality binary packages) is that I can use the same package versions, compiled exactly the same (to the extent possible) on OS X, Linux, and Solaris; and these are production-ready releases used in production by Joyent (and others) vetted by actual release engineers.
And with pkgsrc it is trivial to install from source when you need to modify a package locally (unlike, say, with apt).
Hence, trying to get such libraries installed with homebrew results in dependency hell, as the package manager won't handle those dependencies.