OK but what I like about homebrew on mac is that when I'm having an issue with "popular stack X broke after updating" it's probably me and >10k other people out there, so by the time I hit the problem it's already under investigation on GH. I'm not sure the same would apply to homebrew on Linux - even if you ignore the differences between distros - how popular is homebrew on linux and linux desktop in comparison ?
I wish more of those 10k people would help get others off of a package manager that is so fragile and convoluted that updating so often leads to popular things breaking.
Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.
If you need to build something from source (my use-case: Vim, so I can change which language bindings exist in the resulting build) it can sometimes be a lot easier than cloning and using the "raw" C/Make build system.
Also, assuming a downstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, what's in Homebrew is likely a more up to date package. You could fiddle with adding/using Debian testing or some PPA, or... you could just use Homebrew.
(FWIW: I use Arch and the AUR on my desktop Linux installs these days, and it's essentially the same process. But still using Homebrew on the Mac, and occasionally in Linux when I'm not on a desktop)
rafaelmn|2 years ago
jmbwell|2 years ago
Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.
edgyquant|2 years ago
samtheprogram|2 years ago
Also, assuming a downstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, what's in Homebrew is likely a more up to date package. You could fiddle with adding/using Debian testing or some PPA, or... you could just use Homebrew.
(FWIW: I use Arch and the AUR on my desktop Linux installs these days, and it's essentially the same process. But still using Homebrew on the Mac, and occasionally in Linux when I'm not on a desktop)