Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 7.0.0. The most significant changes since 6.0.0 are faster installations and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checks and an advisory database, the end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs moving to Tier 3 (announced last year).
Literally just upgraded before seeing this post; I had 31 outdated packages and the first thing I saw was how blazing fast it was! I looked online to see if something changed and saw this post.
Speed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.
Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.
Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
I was kinda kidding because parent called it "blazing" fast lol. I didn't think it was Rust. Blazing fast software is reserved as a descriptor for Rust programs :)
i just tested and `mise bootstrap` is over twice as fast at installing when a bottle was in the cache. other commands like `status/check` are 20-30x faster. that's without spending much work at all on perf—i'm sure i could bring these numbers down much further.
I don't know anything about homebrew, but have a question ...
I see some parallels between homebrew and Gradle ... for the longest time Gradle was using Groovy for build scripts. The Gradle / Groovy build script DSL was a little too magic and dynamically typed. It looked cute, but led to issues in developer UX (awful stack traces), tooling (documentation and autocomplete), robustness, and performance.
There are other reasons why Gradle is moving away from Groovy. I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining. Declarative Gradle, which is the future, is not Turing complete.
I can't help but notice the parallels between Gradle / Groovy and Homebrew / Ruby: using a dynamically typed Ruby DSL with Turing completeness like the olden Gradle ways, and Ruby is declining in popularity like Groovy.
I would have to imagine at some point, the people who know Ruby well enough to create / debug formulae will dwindle. What are the plans?
> I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining
One big surprise for me at a genomics/bioinformatics company was that of the three main technologies for orchestating bioinformatics workflows, Snakemake, Cromwell, and Nextflow, Nextflow was in a language based on Groovy. It took me back.
Except ~nobody uses declarative gradle in production yet, and groovy is mostly declining in favour of also turing complete Kotlin. It's yet to be discovered how declarative gradle fares and how much of imperative glue real-life projects will need
Ultimately you don’t need to know much Ruby to maintain or contribute to Homebrew. Ruby makes it very easy to write custom DSLs that don’t feel like Ruby. I didn’t really know any before working on Homebrew and it’s now my primary language.
That said, yes we have already moved away from our DSL being Turing Complete. This release drops for official taps the ability for packages to run arbitrary postinstall/uninstall/etc. Ruby in favour of DSLs and our JSON API.
This will likely get extended over time to eventually allow package definitions to themselves be in JSON.
Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps? Some software defies such an easy categorization. If your default install doesn't come with docker and you install docker later for development, does that make docker a user-facing app? What about language toolchains like golang, rust, npm, etc?
> Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps?
If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too.
I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
> I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
Digression, but I’m curious since you brought it up: Are you saying that Silverblue-based distros are noticeably more stable than Fedora? Or is it more a theoretical benefit, that you believe more in the long-term stability of that architecture?
> Are you saying that Silverblue-based distros are noticeably more stable than Fedora?
TBH, I can only say it's far more stable than openSUSE, Ubuntu and Manjaro which are the non-atomic distros I've used for a long time.
Aurora has never broken and I've never had any major problems that I can recall in over two years years. I never initiate updates of the system, my Flatpaks or Homebrew. That happens in the background and whenever i restart (without me noticing).
It's Linux for those who have work to do and don't want to be a sysadmin for their desktop.
> I never initiate updates of the system, my Flatpaks or Homebrew. That happens in the background and whenever i restart (without me noticing).
Two follow-up questions on this:
- How does Homebrew auto-update on Linux? Do you have a daemon, cron job, or similar? Or a plugin for GNOME Software, Discover, or similar? (I’ve used Homebrew on Mac and Linux, but not with auto-updates.)
- Does Aurora sometimes reboot multiple times when doing updates? On normal Fedora I usually end up running dnf update manually to avoid doing updates in batches; when it updates on reboot, it can reboot 2-4 times… I have full-disk encryption on my laptop and it’s painful to have to wait for all the password prompts during updates. If this could happen be done in one reboot on atomic distros that would certainly be a benefit.
> How does Homebrew auto-update on Linux? Do you have a daemon, cron job, or similar? Or a plugin for GNOME Software, Discover, or similar? (I’ve used Homebrew on Mac and Linux, but not with auto-updates.)
I don't know, and I don't want to have know, how it works. :) It just does. You can force updates by running "ujust update". It updates Homebrew, Flatpaks, the system image and all Distroboxes in one go. You can also turn auto updates off.
> Does Aurora sometimes reboot multiple times when doing updates?
I doesn't reboot at all. I never notice updates, they happen in the background. System image upgrades are applied that time I turn off my computer and turn it on again. No extra reboots then. It's just a boot like any other.
Unless doing something esoteric like updating firmware that requires manual intervention, Fedora Atomic distros should never need to reboot multiple times to update, as updates are staged as side-by-side replacements of the entire base system, which includes essentially everything that would be installed through the system package manager in a traditional distro, so it's effectively like booting into an upgrade install of the OS (so preserving configuration files, user data, containers Flatpaks, etc.), except the old version remains available as a bootable option (which is possible because the atomic distros carefully separate OS and user directories, with the former typically mounted read-only).
The only times I've (very rarely) run into trouble is when adding additional RPMs to the base install, which, while frowned upon for this reason, generally poses no more problems than installing the same packages in a traditional Fedora installation, so worst-case you can simply uninstall the layered packages and re-run the update if something isn't working.
Again, without a reboot, because incompatible updates generally while staging, not after rebooting the system into the new OS, e.g., a package, possibly from an external repo, which does not exist, or depends on packages that do not exist, in the version you're updating to.
Aside from major version upgrades where packages you've layered might simply have been removed, this occasionally happens if you're installing packages from an external repo like RPM Fusion that's closely integrated with the base OS, because there are times when the base image (or even loose package mirrors) might lag a bit behind released loose packages which updates of external packages may depend on, and while you can override base image packages to resolve this, it's a bit of a hassle and probably not worth the trouble vs simply waiting until the base image catches up. Unless you have specific needs that can't be resolved by, e.g., running applications that require proprietary video codecs as Flatpaks or in containers, I'd recommend sidestepping this whole mess by not layering anything from RPM Fusion or similar (layering to pick up third-party packages that don't depend on very specific versions of distro packages works fine).
Generally speaking, nothing in the update / RPM install / RPM uninstall process touches the running OS unless you specifically request that it does, and nothing changes the on-disk copy of the running OS period. So, e.g., you can add new RPMs to the running install without rebooting, but how this works is that it first adds them to a new staged install, then creates transient filesystem overlays to activate the packages within the running OS. In other words, the on-disk copy of the current running OS remains unchanged and available in case anything goes wrong.
It's an interesting question on Linux. On macOS entire toolchains would be fair game. I just ran `brew install colima`, `brew install llvm`, etc.
But clearly anything that would conflict with distro-specific opinionated decisions is out. Or DE-specific opinionated decisions. Maybe a good rule is "anything that would be useful simutaneously on all *nix".
"Conflict" is maybe a strong word? Homebrew installs stuff into its own directory tree so it should in theory not have issues coexisting with native packages.
I use `lima` and `llvm` every day with brew. It works great there's no reason to use distro specific tooling when you can use what everyone else is using.
Then again I use versioned AppDirs on Linux since +20 years anyway, so I am
not really into any arbitrary disctinction random linux distributions try
to push down onto the (downstream) userbase. Besides, if you compile from source, why
would you want to rely on the distribution package manager to begin with?
None of them allow for versioned AppDirs by default as far as I know; NixOS
uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux
of course), but as far as I know if you are on e. g. a debian system, you can
not use it for a versioned AppDir layout.
> NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course)
Also Guix, which is inspired by Nix. Don’t know about AppDir support, though. Are AppDirs more of a general concept or a formalised standard? In what capacity are you using them?
I use "dnf" to upgrade my system and "flatpak update" and "brew upgrade" to upgrade the apps I've installed.
An app like VirtualBox does not install using Flatpak or Homebrew, so I would use dnf for that. It's usually an app or two that doesn't work via Flatpak/Homebrew/AppImage that I need to install using dnf.
That perhaps makes more sense when a regular user doesn’t have root, and the IT department is responsible for maintaining system packages. On my own machines I just use my system package manager for everything.
would you please share what amount of the new dev (work done on brew) is AI/LLM-assisted. this major version bump was very quick to arrive compared to when v6 got released?
Thank you, very insightful. TBH, expected an actual flow of nonsense and suspicion meanwhile, but a daly later there is still none, perhaps the general sentiment already shifted enough. It also confirms the notion that the credibility of the author is more important than the credibility of the means to develop. Also, of course, we're all going to move to newer brew sooner or later, so this all effort is much appreciated.
The dedicated user isn't really required; it just expects that /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew exists. That can just be a symlink to your home directory. But yes, creating that symlink requires root on most systems. Brew itself doesn't require root or that pathname; you can put packages anywhere, but then many will have to be built from scratch since the pre-built packages don't work. And you need bubblewrap installed (which requires root) to use the sandbox, but again that is optional.
All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.
See the release notes: we now have experimental support for using any prefix shorter than the Linux default. We are aiming to eventually fully support (Tier 1) any prefix under 64 bytes long.
I’d imagine they’re live updating the library paths in the binary headers, so anything shorter or equal to what they’re using is a simple rewrite, but longer is more complex.
The present is built mostly on layers of the long-past :)
It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.
How long do you expect them to support Intel processors though? It’s been like 6 years since the last MacBook release had any Intel processor, and Apple doesn’t make OS updates anymore, so it doesn’t surprise me that Homebrew stopped too.
NixOS is an open source project that runs great on my 2013 Dell laptop. I think the real point of distinction is that brew depends on Apple's OS and SDK, which somewhat ties their hands, while other OSs don't.
6 years is really not a long time at all. You can probably find heaps of open source software out there that compiles and runs perfectly on 20 year old PCs. It's not like the maintainer has to do much to retain support--they just have to not make the software dependent on new operating systems.
Homebrew doesn't have to lift a finger to support Intel Macs. It already does! All they have to do is not kill support for them.
Hey, it's their software, they are all volunteers and can do whatever they want. I'm grateful for the short window of time in which I was able to use their software. I don't get to decide their support period, but I will still hopelessly complain about it. "Deliberately breaking compatibility with a computer because it is old" is my biggest axe to grind with the whole software industry, and I'll shake my fists at this cloud until I die.
Software maintenance is not free, especially for a project the size of Homebrew, and it's perfectly reasonable for software to not be supported on older computers due to maintenance burden, with a good example being 32 bit processors. If you had a 32 bit processor would you expect all of your software that was supported now to be supported forever, just because it supports it now?
Exactly. That's all I'm asking for. If version X works on my system today and version Y needs an OS bump, well... that sucks and is avoidable, but whatever. I expect to be able to obtain and use version X tomorrow and into the future. That's it. I'm not asking to make version Y work for me, but it would be nice if they didn't add the OS dependency.
But increasingly, developers can't even manage to keep version X around and working, despite them having to simply not do anything to it to keep it from breaking.
There's been a huge step up in basically everything going from intel to apple silicon. It's not a comparable hardware in any sense, and as such, it really does feel like it became a paperweight? I know I never wanted to see an intel macbook ever again the moment I tried M1. It's maybe hard to comprehend how different it is if you haven't used both. And at the same time I'm happy with my x86 desktop for 10+ years. Only thing that really improved in that span was storage.
So I wouldn't say this applies globally to apple users/products, but the post-intel era is a special case. If nothing else, they are helping the environment by not feeding that (literally) hot garbage with more electricity.
Sure, but 2019s Intel Macs are aboslutely usable for most tasks, and given much of the agentic dev. happens... somewhere remotely, it is more an opportunity to reuse this equipment for various tasks, rather than pollute the already dirty Earth with more electronic waste.
Years, honestly. After all, Intel Macs just received a major macOS release from Apple only 12 months ago. MacPorts manages to support all the way back to Leopard!
Check out MacPorts. It was the original package manager, still going strong, and it supports Macs going all the way back to the Leopard era. It also always used /opt instead of taking over /usr/bin like Homebrew.
I always found it much slower when compared to brew and sometimes would just hang and get stuck when installing something. Plus the lack of casks does make it less of a direct replacement.
Same here, but I understand their position. Meanwhile I rely on packages publishing builds for Intel Mac in GitHub (surprisingly a lot) or building from source code. I just asked AI to build me install system.
I recommend MacPorts, the migration is easy, you copy the package names you installed with brew, uninstall homebrew (there's an unisntall script on brew.sh FAQ section, it will also uninstall all homebrew packages (but not the casks)) then install macports and reinstall the packages with sudo port. Although the selection is smaller on macports and newer packages might not have a prebuilt pkg for your OS so you still might end up building manually (My poor i5 4core had to attempt building nodejs26 because there wasn't a pkg for Ventura)
> The Intel support decision reflects the limits of a volunteer-run project: Apple have dropped Intel x86_64 support from macOS 27 Golden Gate and GitHub Actions will retire Intel macOS runners in autumn 2027. If Apple and Microsoft’s GitHub, two of the world’s largest technology companies, cannot continue supporting macOS Intel x86_64, sadly neither can Homebrew. MacPorts still supports macOS Intel x86_64 and is likely to provide better results on this platform.
That's an excellent question the the maintainers of the MacPorts project! It can supplement the very clear and polite answer you've already received from a maintainer of Homebrew.
Breadth of support and retention of historical support are also priorities that differ between other software distributions, especially free operating systems.
See Debian vs. Ubuntu, or NetBSD vs. DragonflyBSD.
Some software distributions emphasize package freshness and coverage, like Homebrew does, which multiplies the support burden involved for each architecture or platform supported.
Others have a more prominent focus on backwards compatibility or exotic architectures, but have a smaller or slower-moving package set.
Supporting macOS Intel has been significantly harder, slower and more expensive for us the last few years than adding ARM Linux support. If it was easy and free we’d have kept it for longer (until Apple and GitHub killed theirs at least which is coming in less than a year).
Homebrew is incredibly useful for immutable Linux distributions.
That said, after trying Bazzite I now prefer CachyOS and Arch as a whole.
I can see the appeal of using Homebrew and Flatpak to keep OS updates a little more separate from app updates, although I don't really see a specific need for it for myself.
So much of GNU et al is already in Homebrew that I wonder how close you are to being able to support Intel Macs using the Linux/amd64 branch (or backend or whatever you call it) of Homebrew or something close to it, possibly after installing a few base libraries and utilities from MacPorts.
2018 mac minis support up to macOS 15.7.9, not 10.15, so you should still be able to use it. Not that it really matters though, using Homebrew on anything other than a tier 1 installation is a miserable experience.
You're definitely right about that. I'll admit it. If you're not the kind of person who likes to throw all your electronics out every few years to spend $thousands on new ones then the Apple ecosystem is not for you.
It's a weird situation in that the standards for mobile devices like cell phones and tablets are on the floor compared to those for PCs, so Apple's same 6-year cutoff feels respectable for smartphones but miserly for laptops.
Uncompensated volunteers dropping support for a 7 year old device that is shortly going to be unsupported by the manufacturer isn't a rug pull.
Entitlement can be wild, volunteers are volunteers. Consumers of volunteer output are free to support their use cases themselves on their own time. Find an ARM Mac used (like an M1) and upgrade.
If it no longer is supported by software, it’s no longer perfectly good. Certainly, if you want to spend your time on supporting unsupported hardware based on personal belief, that’s a choice, and it’s your time. Compare to the cost of replacing the hardware. Time is not free, it is the ultimate non renewable resource. We are all slowly dying one day at a time, is that how you want to spend your time?
Recycle old gear when the math no longer maths and move on.
So discard a working and perfectly good Macbook to be replaced by a new one manufactured by the World’s #1 CO2 emitter and transported probably halfway around the world in a container ship burning dirty bunker fuel.
As I replied in another comment[1], it's their software, their choice. Homebrew devs are doing the volunteer work, so they get to decide the support period and when to pull the rug out. I'll still shake my fists about it, because it's personally my biggest problem with the entire software industry's attitude, not just open source.
I'm probably the millionth person to parrot this to you but my goodness you are a hero if you can tolerate the Intel Mac experience in 2026.
I thought my Intel Mac from that era was incredibly weird. Little firmware-ish things were so glitchy and sluggish. At some point the wake from sleep/lid open just took forever in ways that didn't happen on older Intel Mac models (or maybe I was going crazy). I just had this strange feeling that Apple was knowingly half-hearting their Intel drivers and products as a whole as they were putting more energy into developing Apple Silicon.
Dude, you owe it to yourself to just grab a used M2 MacBook Air or something along those lines. Treat yourself. You'll be kicking yourself for not doing so sooner. (Don't get a MacBook Neo, too many compromises including poor battery life, a used Air is much better, and if you use more than one external monitor use caution on what model/CPU you choose).
Sure, a laptop should last longer than 7 years, but this is one of those "Apple yeets out a new architecture" exceptions like the PowerPC to Intel transition. Better to accept it and move on. 7 years is still a solid run. You've only got ~2 more years left until you start losing security updates anyway.
The other machine I highly recommend is Linux/Framework 13 Pro with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, although that's a whole different price class, and obviously not everyone can make that move in terms of software compatibility.
I sell all my previous devices on second hand markets like eBay. That question becomes "not my problem:" whoever else is buying it has some kind of use case even though I am done with the system and it no longer fits my use case anymore.
I think that, for the parent commenter to my original comment, this Intel Mac no longer fits their use case. They can fight it and suffer or get the right tool for the job. I'm sure the person who buys it from them won't care that the current version of Homebrew doesn't work on it.
Intel Macs run Linux very well, I might add.
It should also be noted that, yes, most electronics eventually get scrapped for parts and raw materials. It doesn't really take all that long for important components to fail to a point where a computer is not really worth dealing with anymore. Yes, they can be repaired in many cases, but that's only generally worth it to a small group of vintage enthusiasts (and I say this as someone who very much enjoys vintage computing myself).
And what if you are a developer and need to replace a well specced Mac and don’t have serious budget, especially considering recent memory and storage price increases?
Rather than a coffee table status symbol or a fashion accessory for pretending to write a novel in the coffee shop?
Any modern Linux distro works great on Intel Macs. Been daily driving with Debian 13 initially and now NixOS on my MBP2015, have not used the MacOS Sequoia partition for months!
If you're going to update that frequently, you may want to consider something that allows for cooldown like this [1]. I've gotten more nervous about supply-chain attacks over the last few months.
Just remember that brew still must never be installed on a machine you need to be able to trust.
The supply chain security policy of brew is basically non existent and optimized for low-friction contributions. Think wikipedia. No enforced commit signing, review signing, or multi-party release signing, and thus everything is honor system.
Do not put brew anywhere near systems that access production or even on systems used to review production-bound code.
Those are also all just as bad but you can at least run those fully in containers or vms and never let them touch your host system.
Brew however is a system level package manager so it is expected to install your top level tools with substantial privilege, so for using it on a production capable system you would want maintainer signed commits, maintainer signed reviews, and 2+ maintainer signed reproducible builds, all with well known long lived keys controlled by smartcards of each maintainer on high trust systems.
I am not just talking out of my ass here. We do all of the above in stagex because it is the bare minimum.
They are all significant risks, and we pay significant money to JFrog for their X-ray product to scan and alert on bad dependencies, and significant internal tooling to track which package was used on which developer enclaves.
I found that Mise handles all my needs for development and it is scoped so it doesn't try to update Python and break all my virtual env when I install something new /shrug
I split my usage. Homebrew for OS things mise for the various tooling.
The only problem some things still have a dependency on requiring python and others on the system. The problem being that they’re there, mise works just fine.
True, but Python is the one with an env management system (venv) which is the most prone to breakage for projects that depend on system Python.
Uv is far superior to both mise and Homebrew for Python work, and I find that it removes the vast majority of pain preventing me from using Homebrew by default for most things, and mise only occasionally for specific dev envs.
> have a system python binary and virtual envs linked to it
I'm not sure if you're saying avoid using system python?
In my experience so far, you never want to develop complex software locked to system versions of runtimes. Too often you need a bleeding edge feature, or conversely need to postpone updating due to needing an old version for some reason.
Now that PNPM supports managing runtimes [0], I found that most of Mise's offerings are actually built into package managers. Maybe I will have it graduates from my machine when I have time.
That's the beauty of asdf and then mise; they leverage existing solutions where possible, and unify how to get versioned runtimes for projects. Rust? rustup with mise, ruby? Precompiled when possible, otherwise ruby-build. Etc.
I'm not sure if I trust or want pnpm to support bundling rust for binary plugins, or various sundry toolchains.
I don’t get these questions asking if it’s codex or Claude – I see them often. Does it matter? There are other options out there also, it feels strange to ask this. Like asking “is your car a Toyota or a BMW?“
Long term it matters very much if your car is Toyota or BMW or Kia or John Deere though.
I think some users are also conscious about the longevity of their tooling related to LLM usage, too. Whether it has an effect or not, we've yet to find out.
I think it's because LLMs tend to obsessively write in a this-therefore-that kind of way, where an emdash is often the most semantically fitting punctuation.
Apple devices produce a ton of emdashes; "Smart Punctuation" is enabled by default on iOS and iPadOS, maybe Mac as well - and it's at least a decade old.
I've had to disable it on all my iDevices bc it breaks some Markdown parsers. How big a % of training data was produced on an Apple device? Ehhhhh probably small.
I was surprised to see my Homebrew consider my macOS a Tier 2 for using the very latest macOS version and Xcode version… But I think it's because I don't have Xcode 27.0, which is presumably releasing tomorrow?
Yup! We’ve been using it for a really long time at this point.
Were using Bubblewrap on Linux and moved to Landlock this release.
P.S. HUGE fan of your blog and writing Simon, keep up the great work. It’s the #1 resource I recommend to anyone in the industry wanting to learn more about LLMs (and pelicans).
I scrolled through that whole front page and I still don't know what Homebrew is and what it does which is typical of far too many independently developed projects that promote themselves.
EDIT: I see people explaining to me what it is. That's fine but my point is I don't glean what it is from the front page and that's a problem for a whole lot of such software sites.
"That front page" isn't the front page, it's the release notes for version 7.0.0.
The actual front page has "The Package Manager for Everywhere" as its subtitle (and that exact description as part of its <title>), and that is basically all you need to know. It's a staple for Unix-y power users on macOS (but supports Linux too, including WSL), and version 1.0 will be ten years old next week. You're not very far off from complaining that Postgres release notes don't explain that Postgres is a database.
As a MacPorts users (generally light-weight, just a few things here and there):
Has anyone gone from MP to HB, or vice versa? Why did you switch from one to the other (and perhaps back again)? What did you find as the pros/cons of each?
I switched from Homebrew to MacPorts because of Homebrew's aggressive dropping of macOS versions they consider "too old." Even in the top-comment announcement here[1] they are making sure to include that they are removing support, as if they're proud of it!
MacPorts generally doesn't care what version of macOS you run, so here I am. I'll probably never go back to Homebrew. MP is great!
Yes, the pride in aggressively dropping support for Macs that just received a major OS release from Apple only 12 months ago (and they were selling just three years ago) is a little off-putting.
I switched from MP to Homebrew over a decade ago. At the time, Homebrew was less finicky and better at resolving dependency conflicts. It was a lot easier to get a system running MacPorts into a an irretrievably borked state. Not long after, Homebrew install instructions became ubiquitous, whereas with MacPorts it seemed like you always had to figure it out for yourself — if the package was even available, which it more often wasn’t.
Haven’t used MacPorts since. Has it gotten any better at those things?
I switched from brew to macports, and I have not experienced the first problem at all. In fact, I had more problems with brew, where some package needed to be updated that I did not want, and I caused a cascade of issues.
The second has also never happened to me. macports installs the packages into a separate prefix, and you just add that to the path, so I wonder how it could bork irretrievably.
Regarding instructions: for most packages, I found that just replacing `brew` with `sudo port` is enough, as most ports are available. And quite a few install instructions mention homebrew together with macports. I have not run into missing packages, but sometimes the ones that existed were a little out of date.
I switched from macports to homebrew a decade ago. I needed the lastest version of a program, and I found homebrew updated formulas faster than macports did
I use basically every general-purpose package manager available on macOS simultaneously in a kind of tiered hierarchy of preference.
Homebrew's best differentiated strength imo is the whole Cask subsystem, which basically automates GUI app installs via "first-party" artifacts like .dmg and .pkg files. That's what I still sometimes use it for even though I have other package managers available, including MacPorts, that I prefer for most other things.
The ordering goes something like the following: Nix > pkgsrc > MacPorts > Homebrew > mas (CLI frontend for the App Store).
Each kinda has its niche. Nix is just generally preferable for me, and it covers all of my needs 99% of the time. It also happens to be pretty fast in terms of actual installation even if evaluating the Nix code can be slow for complex projects.
For proper development toolchains, it's all Nix all the time. Those are per-project rather than global, and what can't be managed by Nix isn't managed at all. Nix is this an overriding constraint there, which has never really been a problem for me.
Pkgsrc is good for development tools and terminal apps, but Nix is generally even better for those, so for me it's just an escape hatch in case something is broken or missing in Nixpkgs and I'm too lazy to fix it, or I genuinely want some library installed with its headers findable globally (rare, because that's mostly bad practice imo). Also good if I want a backup copy of an exotic shell or something in case I want to rm -rf /nix and not be forced back into Bash or zsh, which is nice when I'm working on my macOS bootstrap scripts. On macOS, everything you install via Pkgsrc will be a binary install, so it's relatively fast and its performance is relatively predictable.
MacPorts is broadly useful so it's useful for the same things as Pkgsrc, but it's also better at providing GUI Mac apps, built from source. For a while I got Emacs here when Emacs in Nixpkgs had a problem building with native compilation support, for example. Also good for my macOS bootstrap scripts since they're written in literate style in Org mode; it can be nice to have a working Emacs to dump them to disk with even without Nix if I'm iterating on them. MacPorts often ends up building stuff from source on my system, which can be slow, but I don't care because I have very little installed via MacPorts.
Homebrew historically didn't feel "safe" for me for development dependencies for various reasons. Before sandboxing support, running and installing and managing things as your own user felt especially unsafe from a security perspective. Now it's a lot better, but it still feels wrong to have global-ish prefixes owned by a particular user. The aggressive in-place upgrades also feel quite brittle for development dependencies, but to some extent that's true of anything that's not project-local. I also don't like that installing GUI apps with Homebrew can end up putting binaries related to their dependencies and not needed at runtime into my PATH— that feels way messier than what I get with Nix. It can also historically be very slow for what it does, but if you're using it in the recommended way, you don't often have to build from source so you can still expect a faster experience than with MacPorts even though both nominally support binary packages.
All that said, Homebrew shines when it comes to extremely broad support for arbitrary Mac apps, often including proprietary ones, and support for the arbitrary range of installation procedures that macOS app developers expect you to use. It's also very good in terms of freshness for macOS packages. Nix is competitive in that respect, but none of the others remotely are. The stuff I don't like about where Homebrew puts things and the filesystem permissions are also fixable if you use a custom prefix. That's officially unsupported and means you can't use "bottles" (i....
I reluctantly switched from MacPorts to Homebrew around 2014. At that time Homebrew had that yuck factor by recommending it be installed into /usr/local rather than /opt. But still, I switched because there were more formulae in HB than ports in MP. And it turns out that the Homebrew install location is customizable anyways.
Always a joy to see security and performance as a big highlight on a release. Brew is notably slow compared to the other package managers I use, but never in an unbearable way.
I've always used it on my Mac work machines, but always used my native package managers on Linux. What are the reasons to run homebrew on Linux? Better newer package support when you're on something slower moving like a Debian distro?
I've standardized my config scripts on using language managers for those tools (go, cargo, uv), which isn't perfect, so maybe brew is worth a chance.
An LLM helped with the initial tedium of rewording 1000s of PRs from maintainer centric language into user centric language. It was reviewed and edited (by a human) probably >20 times. Go look at the PR if you don’t believe me.
I used to do these all by hand and they took me multiple hours. I still probably spent over an hour, including a bunch of time on a family holiday today. Comments like this make me wonder why I bother sometimes.
FWIW, I also got a bit of an LLM vibe skimming the changelog. In particular, the section about Linux sandboxing jumped out at me:
> Status in 7.0.0: kernels without Landlock continue working without Linux sandboxing in the less secure pre-6.0.0 configuration; brew doctor reports missing protection as an advisory.
> No replacement opt-out; unavailable Landlock remains advisory.
With that being said, I can kind of see why "eliminate all traces of AI writing styles" wouldn't be a goal of the review/editing process. I've been out of the Apple ecosystem for a while, but I imagine Homebrew has enthusiastically adopted LLMs for a lot of tasks. If the public communications reflect that, then people who don't like LLMs can bounce immediately, rather than getting invested in the project and feeling betrayed later.
homebrew is a critical, important piece of software, and I appreciate the effort.
I certainly don’t appreciate the non-effort from reflexive LLM-haters. We get it. You don’t like LLMs. Try to have an opinion and a personality that doesn’t revolve around nitpicking AI writing.
We have a Landlock (formerly Bubblewrap) Linux sandbox due to an LLM. It sat unfixed on our roadmap for almost a decade. I and at least one other maintainer (as well as several LLMs) reviewed every line of code.
Homebrew has never been better performant, secure, tested, linted and typed. I understand the LLM dubiousness (I used to share it myself) but we’re the type of project where it’s very easy to get agents to do sensible end-to-end testing and review a nice language (Ruby). Just us on our outputs, not just our inputs.
One of our former maintainers was in high school when working on Homebrew. I’m sure many people would have found that worrying. His code was great, though (I reviewed most of it) and he made the project better. Same ultimately with LLMs. Your mileage may vary.
I prefer to use Mise for everything nowadays. homebrew bootstrap specifically. A lot easier to manage all of my packages in one single file, homebrew, Node packages, etc.
I migrated our monorepo to use mise with bootstrap and mise-tasks. I was able to delete a whole heap of setup scripts and our brewfile. First time setup is extremely simple now and re-running for updates is blazing fast.
236 comments
[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 88.6 ms ] threadSpeed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.
Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.
Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (fishshell.com)
906 points by jdxcode on Dec 28, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 198 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217
The lessons learned were instead used to make the Ruby frontend much faster.
I see some parallels between homebrew and Gradle ... for the longest time Gradle was using Groovy for build scripts. The Gradle / Groovy build script DSL was a little too magic and dynamically typed. It looked cute, but led to issues in developer UX (awful stack traces), tooling (documentation and autocomplete), robustness, and performance.
There are other reasons why Gradle is moving away from Groovy. I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining. Declarative Gradle, which is the future, is not Turing complete.
I can't help but notice the parallels between Gradle / Groovy and Homebrew / Ruby: using a dynamically typed Ruby DSL with Turing completeness like the olden Gradle ways, and Ruby is declining in popularity like Groovy.
I would have to imagine at some point, the people who know Ruby well enough to create / debug formulae will dwindle. What are the plans?
One big surprise for me at a genomics/bioinformatics company was that of the three main technologies for orchestating bioinformatics workflows, Snakemake, Cromwell, and Nextflow, Nextflow was in a language based on Groovy. It took me back.
That said, yes we have already moved away from our DSL being Turing Complete. This release drops for official taps the ability for packages to run arbitrary postinstall/uninstall/etc. Ruby in favour of DSLs and our JSON API.
This will likely get extended over time to eventually allow package definitions to themselves be in JSON.
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7755#issuecomment-51...
For me the distro package manager is for system packages, Homebrew and Flatpak for the user facing apps.
If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too.
I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
Digression, but I’m curious since you brought it up: Are you saying that Silverblue-based distros are noticeably more stable than Fedora? Or is it more a theoretical benefit, that you believe more in the long-term stability of that architecture?
TBH, I can only say it's far more stable than openSUSE, Ubuntu and Manjaro which are the non-atomic distros I've used for a long time.
Aurora has never broken and I've never had any major problems that I can recall in over two years years. I never initiate updates of the system, my Flatpaks or Homebrew. That happens in the background and whenever i restart (without me noticing).
It's Linux for those who have work to do and don't want to be a sysadmin for their desktop.
> I never initiate updates of the system, my Flatpaks or Homebrew. That happens in the background and whenever i restart (without me noticing).
Two follow-up questions on this:
- How does Homebrew auto-update on Linux? Do you have a daemon, cron job, or similar? Or a plugin for GNOME Software, Discover, or similar? (I’ve used Homebrew on Mac and Linux, but not with auto-updates.)
- Does Aurora sometimes reboot multiple times when doing updates? On normal Fedora I usually end up running dnf update manually to avoid doing updates in batches; when it updates on reboot, it can reboot 2-4 times… I have full-disk encryption on my laptop and it’s painful to have to wait for all the password prompts during updates. If this could happen be done in one reboot on atomic distros that would certainly be a benefit.
I don't know, and I don't want to have know, how it works. :) It just does. You can force updates by running "ujust update". It updates Homebrew, Flatpaks, the system image and all Distroboxes in one go. You can also turn auto updates off.
> Does Aurora sometimes reboot multiple times when doing updates?
I doesn't reboot at all. I never notice updates, they happen in the background. System image upgrades are applied that time I turn off my computer and turn it on again. No extra reboots then. It's just a boot like any other.
The only times I've (very rarely) run into trouble is when adding additional RPMs to the base install, which, while frowned upon for this reason, generally poses no more problems than installing the same packages in a traditional Fedora installation, so worst-case you can simply uninstall the layered packages and re-run the update if something isn't working.
Again, without a reboot, because incompatible updates generally while staging, not after rebooting the system into the new OS, e.g., a package, possibly from an external repo, which does not exist, or depends on packages that do not exist, in the version you're updating to.
Aside from major version upgrades where packages you've layered might simply have been removed, this occasionally happens if you're installing packages from an external repo like RPM Fusion that's closely integrated with the base OS, because there are times when the base image (or even loose package mirrors) might lag a bit behind released loose packages which updates of external packages may depend on, and while you can override base image packages to resolve this, it's a bit of a hassle and probably not worth the trouble vs simply waiting until the base image catches up. Unless you have specific needs that can't be resolved by, e.g., running applications that require proprietary video codecs as Flatpaks or in containers, I'd recommend sidestepping this whole mess by not layering anything from RPM Fusion or similar (layering to pick up third-party packages that don't depend on very specific versions of distro packages works fine).
Generally speaking, nothing in the update / RPM install / RPM uninstall process touches the running OS unless you specifically request that it does, and nothing changes the on-disk copy of the running OS period. So, e.g., you can add new RPMs to the running install without rebooting, but how this works is that it first adds them to a new staged install, then creates transient filesystem overlays to activate the packages within the running OS. In other words, the on-disk copy of the current running OS remains unchanged and available in case anything goes wrong.
But clearly anything that would conflict with distro-specific opinionated decisions is out. Or DE-specific opinionated decisions. Maybe a good rule is "anything that would be useful simutaneously on all *nix".
Then again I use versioned AppDirs on Linux since +20 years anyway, so I am not really into any arbitrary disctinction random linux distributions try to push down onto the (downstream) userbase. Besides, if you compile from source, why would you want to rely on the distribution package manager to begin with?
None of them allow for versioned AppDirs by default as far as I know; NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course), but as far as I know if you are on e. g. a debian system, you can not use it for a versioned AppDir layout.
Also Guix, which is inspired by Nix. Don’t know about AppDir support, though. Are AppDirs more of a general concept or a formalised standard? In what capacity are you using them?
Distinction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683258
I use "dnf" to upgrade my system and "flatpak update" and "brew upgrade" to upgrade the apps I've installed.
An app like VirtualBox does not install using Flatpak or Homebrew, so I would use dnf for that. It's usually an app or two that doesn't work via Flatpak/Homebrew/AppImage that I need to install using dnf.
I would think this is one of the most critical dependency that you would not want to get right away at let it rest for a couple of days
https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/AgentIDE
I actually wrote my own “Agent IDE” to make this prompt/review/push flow easier.
`The macOS deployment target is set to 27.0, but the range of supported ....`
Golden Gate AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHH
Just another few days, right? :)
That really put me off.
All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.
It uses root once to chown its prefix directory /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew
Postgres is an example of this: the various directories are set at build time.
It's so annoying how deeply UNIX packaging philosophy assumes that installation directories are something you hard-code at build time.
It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.
I'm back to the old installation methods !
I'm not blaming the Homebrew project/developers here, but the fact that many people are okay with deprecating perfectly fine hardware.
Bits don't rot.
Hey, it's their software, they are all volunteers and can do whatever they want. I'm grateful for the short window of time in which I was able to use their software. I don't get to decide their support period, but I will still hopelessly complain about it. "Deliberately breaking compatibility with a computer because it is old" is my biggest axe to grind with the whole software industry, and I'll shake my fists at this cloud until I die.
And if you want new bits with the new features, those aren’t the same bits and that work isn’t free.
But increasingly, developers can't even manage to keep version X around and working, despite them having to simply not do anything to it to keep it from breaking.
So I wouldn't say this applies globally to apple users/products, but the post-intel era is a special case. If nothing else, they are helping the environment by not feeding that (literally) hot garbage with more electricity.
2) using an Intel Mac as your main computer, for most tasks != using it as a home server
If you want to continue using the same MacBook that will be only path forward when Apple decides to EOL it (if it hasn't already happened).
I'm a long time Homebrew on Linux user, it works really well. I always prefer it over the distro supplied package manager for user facing CLI apps.
Apart from the issue of having to compile the downloaded software leading to spinning fans, I'm not too concerned.
- 2019 Intel iMac user.
From the release notes:
> The Intel support decision reflects the limits of a volunteer-run project: Apple have dropped Intel x86_64 support from macOS 27 Golden Gate and GitHub Actions will retire Intel macOS runners in autumn 2027. If Apple and Microsoft’s GitHub, two of the world’s largest technology companies, cannot continue supporting macOS Intel x86_64, sadly neither can Homebrew. MacPorts still supports macOS Intel x86_64 and is likely to provide better results on this platform.
Other than that, I'm grateful for the free software.
See Debian vs. Ubuntu, or NetBSD vs. DragonflyBSD.
Some software distributions emphasize package freshness and coverage, like Homebrew does, which multiplies the support burden involved for each architecture or platform supported.
Others have a more prominent focus on backwards compatibility or exotic architectures, but have a smaller or slower-moving package set.
Linux already has world class package managers.
Supporting macOS Intel has been significantly harder, slower and more expensive for us the last few years than adding ARM Linux support. If it was easy and free we’d have kept it for longer (until Apple and GitHub killed theirs at least which is coming in less than a year).
That said, after trying Bazzite I now prefer CachyOS and Arch as a whole.
I can see the appeal of using Homebrew and Flatpak to keep OS updates a little more separate from app updates, although I don't really see a specific need for it for myself.
No need to be sorry, the situation is understandable.
But why drop before that?
When I eventually upgrade my hardware, I’ll happily use Homebrew again. In the meantime, MacPorts!
Entitlement can be wild, volunteers are volunteers. Consumers of volunteer output are free to support their use cases themselves on their own time. Find an ARM Mac used (like an M1) and upgrade.
Recycle old gear when the math no longer maths and move on.
Mindless consumption isn't going to extend your life.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687331
I thought my Intel Mac from that era was incredibly weird. Little firmware-ish things were so glitchy and sluggish. At some point the wake from sleep/lid open just took forever in ways that didn't happen on older Intel Mac models (or maybe I was going crazy). I just had this strange feeling that Apple was knowingly half-hearting their Intel drivers and products as a whole as they were putting more energy into developing Apple Silicon.
Dude, you owe it to yourself to just grab a used M2 MacBook Air or something along those lines. Treat yourself. You'll be kicking yourself for not doing so sooner. (Don't get a MacBook Neo, too many compromises including poor battery life, a used Air is much better, and if you use more than one external monitor use caution on what model/CPU you choose).
Sure, a laptop should last longer than 7 years, but this is one of those "Apple yeets out a new architecture" exceptions like the PowerPC to Intel transition. Better to accept it and move on. 7 years is still a solid run. You've only got ~2 more years left until you start losing security updates anyway.
The other machine I highly recommend is Linux/Framework 13 Pro with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, although that's a whole different price class, and obviously not everyone can make that move in terms of software compatibility.
I think that, for the parent commenter to my original comment, this Intel Mac no longer fits their use case. They can fight it and suffer or get the right tool for the job. I'm sure the person who buys it from them won't care that the current version of Homebrew doesn't work on it.
Intel Macs run Linux very well, I might add.
It should also be noted that, yes, most electronics eventually get scrapped for parts and raw materials. It doesn't really take all that long for important components to fail to a point where a computer is not really worth dealing with anymore. Yes, they can be repaired in many cases, but that's only generally worth it to a small group of vintage enthusiasts (and I say this as someone who very much enjoys vintage computing myself).
And what if you are a developer and need to replace a well specced Mac and don’t have serious budget, especially considering recent memory and storage price increases?
Rather than a coffee table status symbol or a fashion accessory for pretending to write a novel in the coffee shop?
welcome. - 2015 intel macbook user
it can be installed with:
brew install homebrew-app
Run it every couple of days, easy peasy.
1. https://github.com/whoschek/homebrew-cooldown
The supply chain security policy of brew is basically non existent and optimized for low-friction contributions. Think wikipedia. No enforced commit signing, review signing, or multi-party release signing, and thus everything is honor system.
Do not put brew anywhere near systems that access production or even on systems used to review production-bound code.
Brew however is a system level package manager so it is expected to install your top level tools with substantial privilege, so for using it on a production capable system you would want maintainer signed commits, maintainer signed reviews, and 2+ maintainer signed reproducible builds, all with well known long lived keys controlled by smartcards of each maintainer on high trust systems.
I am not just talking out of my ass here. We do all of the above in stagex because it is the bare minimum.
The only problem some things still have a dependency on requiring python and others on the system. The problem being that they’re there, mise works just fine.
This is all you have to add to the config file:
[bootstrap.packages]
"brew:git" = "latest"
"brew-cask:ghostty" = "latest"
Uv is far superior to both mise and Homebrew for Python work, and I find that it removes the vast majority of pain preventing me from using Homebrew by default for most things, and mise only occasionally for specific dev envs.
Probably wouldn't:
https://mise.jdx.dev/mise-cookbook/python.html#mise-uv
> have a system python binary and virtual envs linked to it
I'm not sure if you're saying avoid using system python?
In my experience so far, you never want to develop complex software locked to system versions of runtimes. Too often you need a bleeding edge feature, or conversely need to postpone updating due to needing an old version for some reason.
Now that PNPM supports managing runtimes [0], I found that most of Mise's offerings are actually built into package managers. Maybe I will have it graduates from my machine when I have time.
[0]: https://pnpm.io/cli/runtime
I'm not sure if I trust or want pnpm to support bundling rust for binary plugins, or various sundry toolchains.
But use what works for you.
That's what I'm saying, yes. System python should be treated as a REPL for interactive shell scripting and otherwise ignored entirely.
Eg: mise use -g gcloud instead of brew install xxx
It can even do that for npm packages! Like mise use -g npm:xxx
We hope to allow all prefixes under 64 bytes in future.
Is it Claude or Codex built?
I think some users are also conscious about the longevity of their tooling related to LLM usage, too. Whether it has an effect or not, we've yet to find out.
I've had to disable it on all my iDevices bc it breaks some Markdown parsers. How big a % of training data was produced on an Apple device? Ehhhhh probably small.
I’ll update Xcode, but I will definitely not install macOS 27.0
Were using Bubblewrap on Linux and moved to Landlock this release.
P.S. HUGE fan of your blog and writing Simon, keep up the great work. It’s the #1 resource I recommend to anyone in the industry wanting to learn more about LLMs (and pelicans).
EDIT: I see people explaining to me what it is. That's fine but my point is I don't glean what it is from the front page and that's a problem for a whole lot of such software sites.
The actual front page has "The Package Manager for Everywhere" as its subtitle (and that exact description as part of its <title>), and that is basically all you need to know. It's a staple for Unix-y power users on macOS (but supports Linux too, including WSL), and version 1.0 will be ten years old next week. You're not very far off from complaining that Postgres release notes don't explain that Postgres is a database.
Looks like this release breaks Intel Macs. Very very sad. Not even 5+ year old hardware is apparently supportable to some devs
Has anyone gone from MP to HB, or vice versa? Why did you switch from one to the other (and perhaps back again)? What did you find as the pros/cons of each?
MacPorts generally doesn't care what version of macOS you run, so here I am. I'll probably never go back to Homebrew. MP is great!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49681546
Haven’t used MacPorts since. Has it gotten any better at those things?
The second has also never happened to me. macports installs the packages into a separate prefix, and you just add that to the path, so I wonder how it could bork irretrievably.
Regarding instructions: for most packages, I found that just replacing `brew` with `sudo port` is enough, as most ports are available. And quite a few install instructions mention homebrew together with macports. I have not run into missing packages, but sometimes the ones that existed were a little out of date.
Homebrew's best differentiated strength imo is the whole Cask subsystem, which basically automates GUI app installs via "first-party" artifacts like .dmg and .pkg files. That's what I still sometimes use it for even though I have other package managers available, including MacPorts, that I prefer for most other things.
The ordering goes something like the following: Nix > pkgsrc > MacPorts > Homebrew > mas (CLI frontend for the App Store).
Each kinda has its niche. Nix is just generally preferable for me, and it covers all of my needs 99% of the time. It also happens to be pretty fast in terms of actual installation even if evaluating the Nix code can be slow for complex projects.
For proper development toolchains, it's all Nix all the time. Those are per-project rather than global, and what can't be managed by Nix isn't managed at all. Nix is this an overriding constraint there, which has never really been a problem for me.
Pkgsrc is good for development tools and terminal apps, but Nix is generally even better for those, so for me it's just an escape hatch in case something is broken or missing in Nixpkgs and I'm too lazy to fix it, or I genuinely want some library installed with its headers findable globally (rare, because that's mostly bad practice imo). Also good if I want a backup copy of an exotic shell or something in case I want to rm -rf /nix and not be forced back into Bash or zsh, which is nice when I'm working on my macOS bootstrap scripts. On macOS, everything you install via Pkgsrc will be a binary install, so it's relatively fast and its performance is relatively predictable.
MacPorts is broadly useful so it's useful for the same things as Pkgsrc, but it's also better at providing GUI Mac apps, built from source. For a while I got Emacs here when Emacs in Nixpkgs had a problem building with native compilation support, for example. Also good for my macOS bootstrap scripts since they're written in literate style in Org mode; it can be nice to have a working Emacs to dump them to disk with even without Nix if I'm iterating on them. MacPorts often ends up building stuff from source on my system, which can be slow, but I don't care because I have very little installed via MacPorts.
Homebrew historically didn't feel "safe" for me for development dependencies for various reasons. Before sandboxing support, running and installing and managing things as your own user felt especially unsafe from a security perspective. Now it's a lot better, but it still feels wrong to have global-ish prefixes owned by a particular user. The aggressive in-place upgrades also feel quite brittle for development dependencies, but to some extent that's true of anything that's not project-local. I also don't like that installing GUI apps with Homebrew can end up putting binaries related to their dependencies and not needed at runtime into my PATH— that feels way messier than what I get with Nix. It can also historically be very slow for what it does, but if you're using it in the recommended way, you don't often have to build from source so you can still expect a faster experience than with MacPorts even though both nominally support binary packages.
All that said, Homebrew shines when it comes to extremely broad support for arbitrary Mac apps, often including proprietary ones, and support for the arbitrary range of installation procedures that macOS app developers expect you to use. It's also very good in terms of freshness for macOS packages. Nix is competitive in that respect, but none of the others remotely are. The stuff I don't like about where Homebrew puts things and the filesystem permissions are also fixable if you use a custom prefix. That's officially unsupported and means you can't use "bottles" (i....
I've always used it on my Mac work machines, but always used my native package managers on Linux. What are the reasons to run homebrew on Linux? Better newer package support when you're on something slower moving like a Debian distro?
I've standardized my config scripts on using language managers for those tools (go, cargo, uv), which isn't perfect, so maybe brew is worth a chance.
exactly
I used to do these all by hand and they took me multiple hours. I still probably spent over an hour, including a bunch of time on a family holiday today. Comments like this make me wonder why I bother sometimes.
> Status in 7.0.0: kernels without Landlock continue working without Linux sandboxing in the less secure pre-6.0.0 configuration; brew doctor reports missing protection as an advisory.
> No replacement opt-out; unavailable Landlock remains advisory.
With that being said, I can kind of see why "eliminate all traces of AI writing styles" wouldn't be a goal of the review/editing process. I've been out of the Apple ecosystem for a while, but I imagine Homebrew has enthusiastically adopted LLMs for a lot of tasks. If the public communications reflect that, then people who don't like LLMs can bounce immediately, rather than getting invested in the project and feeling betrayed later.
homebrew is a critical, important piece of software, and I appreciate the effort.
I certainly don’t appreciate the non-effort from reflexive LLM-haters. We get it. You don’t like LLMs. Try to have an opinion and a personality that doesn’t revolve around nitpicking AI writing.
Homebrew has never been better performant, secure, tested, linted and typed. I understand the LLM dubiousness (I used to share it myself) but we’re the type of project where it’s very easy to get agents to do sensible end-to-end testing and review a nice language (Ruby). Just us on our outputs, not just our inputs.
One of our former maintainers was in high school when working on Homebrew. I’m sure many people would have found that worrying. His code was great, though (I reviewed most of it) and he made the project better. Same ultimately with LLMs. Your mileage may vary.
https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap/packages/brew.html
mise has been an absolute delight.