Homebrew also just started publishing their stats:<p><a href="https://brew.sh/analytics/" rel="nofollow">https://brew.sh/analytics/</a><p>Neovim is about as popular as emacs now (backhanded compliment?).<p>We just released Neovim 0.2 (now supports Windows) a few minutes ago, so it's funny to see Homebrew and LuaJit releases on HN now.
I love brew! But just be careful because it has a tendency to be unhelpful with its updates. Same thing with cask. That's the way they do things, and I understand that it makes sense for them.<p>For example, I wasn't on El Captain yet, so I had to checkout an older version of openemu.rb. It seems like this would be something that could be automated, and if I had time, I might.<p>Inspired by Tigerbrew[1], I was actually thinking of making some sort of "LTS" tap, which has stability and predictability.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew</a>
Homebrew + Strap is a winning combination. (<a href="https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap</a>)<p>But I do think that the various taps and casks and sprockets and bits are potentially getting out of hand. Homebrew 2.0 - New API and usage pattern?<p>However:<p>cask outdated: Finally! Thank you!
search: Updates most welcome.<p>And plenty of others. Thanks for all. And one tip:<p>export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1<p>That saves me no end of time and irritation on slower networks. And on faster networks, too. I don't want auto-update on by default, but if it has to be, so be it. There's the fix.
I just saw that Homebrew has a Patreon page. I use brew everyday and want to make sure they stick around. I encourage others to support the project as well:<p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/homebrew" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/homebrew</a>
What's the status of the relationship between Homebrew and Linuxbrew? I remember a while ago there were discussions about making the two systems more compatible (or even merging them?). I'd love to see Homebrew take off on Linux.
I used to install everything on my Mac through Homebrew if it's available on Homebrew, but recently I found myself starting to moving away from Homebrew.<p>First it's Go. Go installed from Homebrew lacks the source code, so I cannot ^] into a standard function's source code in vim-go. So I did `brew rm go` and installed the pkg version instead.<p>Then the recent rust update had some problem building in Homebrew, and I discovered that the rustup tool is actually very nicely done, so I did `brew rm rust` and used rustup instead.
I've been using Homebrew for a few years now, but I've gotta admit that recently I've been intrigued by MacPorts. Can anyone that has tried both extensively share their thoughts, and possibly explain why they're using one or the other? I read up a few comments online from having googled around, but I'd love something more recent.<p>One of my complaints with Homebrew (and most system package managers) is that it treats all dependencies as equal. If I install X, which depends on Y and Z... I'd expect Y and Z to be removed when uninstalling X. If anyone else is frustrated by this, I'd suggest checking out homebrew-bundle [0]. The idea is simple: you create a Brewfile and you use that to track dependencies. Instead of installing stuff from the CLI, you add entries to your Brewfile and run "brew bundle --global". Sadly it won't do any automatic cleanups, so you have to run "brew bundle cleanup --global" to get a list of extraneous packages and remove em manually.<p>Another obvious benefit to using a text file is that you can annotate it with reminders. "What did I install this foobar tool for?"<p>I think migrating towards a shell environment which gets configured using idempotent scripts can help reduce bugs and lower the barrier of entry to people less familiar with the ecosystem, as well as make it easier to get your own system up and running. In the last few weeks I started toying around with nix [1], which seems to promise that... Although I'm still finding my way through their ecosystem.<p>I'd like to think I'm a fairly pragmatic user, so I'm willing to accept some hacks here and there. A few days back I put up a repo [2] to show what my macOS + fish shell setup looks like. It won't track configs to clean-up garbage or anything fancy like that, so if you make any change you might need to clean up manually. But it should make bootstrapping a new system a bit easier, and it encourages you to configure all universal variable definitions in a single place so you can add notes for why you're doing whatever it is you're doing. One of the biggest benefits of maintaining an idempotent fish config is that it has great performance. Since fish shell persists environment values in a single file and it lazy-loads function definitions, starting a new session happens almost instantly.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle</a><p>[1] <a href="https://nixos.org/nix/" rel="nofollow">https://nixos.org/nix/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/cesarandreu/dotfiles" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cesarandreu/dotfiles</a>
If you upgrade, and care about these things, don't forget to check your analytics settings:<p><pre><code> brew analytics
</code></pre>
I had my analytics options turned off prior to the upgrade, and after the upgrade - without any warning/hints/messages/notifications - analytics was back on again.<p>A bit underhanded, but I'm used to it by now.
I loved Homebrew - it was never quite as good as apt-get but it was a necessary sacrifice to run Unix on a popular desktop OS.<p>However in 2017, if you're interested in a desktop OS with a bunch of Unix tools available, apt-get on Windows works perfectly.