I'd really love to see someone make this portable to other unixes -- it'd be lovely to finally have good package management for the ~/mine/bin dirs I have on servers everywhere
Amen. That could be hugely powerful.
Amen. That could be hugely powerful.
I also added the feature where you can specify a git:// or svn:// protocol for a formula so you can easily keep up with HEAD development for your favourite project.
With homebrew, you could sync just the dotfiles and the list of installed packages, and let it take care of installing/upgrading packages on each machine. It'd be even better if it was smart enough to not shadow system packages when they are present+adequate.
If dotfiles aren't compatible across OS kernels, you're doing something wrong. I keep scripts in ~/bin under VC, but with anything that needs to be compiled I just track the source and build with make (or emacs, etc.). You don't need to put everything in ~/bin in the repository!
From the summary, I don't really see how the system would work transparently across OS X, Linux, and BSD. It looks like it expects git + Ruby + OS X, and I don't use the latter two. (I prefer Lua and OpenBSD, respectively, but that's me.) Also, I work with i386, amd64, and occasionally sparc, and the platform thing isn't an issue since I'm not syncing binaries.
A major use case is the ability for your app to be able to pull in it's own sandboxed dependencies in a crossplatform way -- so anyone can develop on their macbook independently of their system is set up, and deploy on any worthwhile server regardless of its setup.
gem does a pretty damn good job of this for Ruby libraries, but it doesn't help at all for the native libraries and utilities that the gems are wrappers around :)
It would be nice if it actually worked, but coming up with a perfectly portable global packaging system would be hard enough if it was working across platforms for one vendor, let alone the big mob that is the open source world.