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7 pointslabianchin5 comments

Has somebody used it? It seems to be better to install software that is not supported by the distro, instead of dealing with PPAs.

Although there's nothing better on Mac and I use it daily, I really think Homebrew is a hack and doesn't really fit into Linux well.

Absolutely agree with this.

The project's obsession with compiling from source by default is ridiculous - not only does it mean that installing trivial packages can take an age, it means that major OS updates can and do often break the ability to build a package, while a compiled binary runs fine.

Case in point: it is currently impossible to install the Homebrew package for casperjs, as it relies on the package for phantomjs, which will not build on Yosemite. The phantomjs developer/team have said that they WILL NOT be fixing phantomjs 1.x so it will compile on Yosemite, because their efforts are all on 2.x.. which is not stable, and also won't compile on Yosemite.

When I mentioned on twitter that (quote) "The more I use @MacHomebrew, the more I miss Apt." I was asked by one of the Homebrew maintainers to not @ mention them - because apparently I was being "not nice" by mentioning a far superior package manager in the same sentence as Homebrew.

The whole thing has given me renewed interest in researching a better packaging system using the built-in package installer.

I've been struggling with this all the time. For example, for months, gcc wouldn't compile on Yosemite, and all packages that depend on it (as there's no version on dependencies, it assumes it requires the latest), even if it's pinned, they still start installing the latest version! Compiling some packages takes hours on MacBook Air. Also, many binaries are hosted on SourceForge, and even upgrading to a point release requires a pull request that needs to be reviewed and approved! I've been waiting weeks to have Terraform upgraded, and I gave up and install all HashiCorp tools myself, not using Homeblew. That's why, I think, it just doesn't make sense in the world of Linux as it doesn't really have a true version and dependency management, it doesn't have things like virtual packages, and other basics, but I'm sure many people who are not comfortable on Linux, but are familiar with OS X and Homebrew, will use it on Linux. Gnome has PackageKit [1] (supposedly cross-Linux), and there's also Zero Install [2], but, honestly, I haven't used them and I don't know if they are any better and work for anything, but GUI apps. I personally started a Bash-based package manager, but having Bash 3.x as a requirement is tough as I cannot use associative arrays - I wonder if I should require v4 and above.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/

[2] http://0install.net/

If you're going to compile the software yourself all the time, why not just create a deb package for it?

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