Why does Homebrew reinvent the packaging wheel? It has issues

3 points by srevenant 2 years ago | 4 comments

First, I love what Homebrew has done to help me out, and I really appreciate all the effort the contributors and maintainers put into projects like it.

But, it's really kindof a PITA, and I can't help but wonder, why doesn't it just re-use an existing package manager? Nix comes to mind, bit it is learning curve... and design is so wildly different maybe not. Yet, one could just use a linux package manager. They literally already cover all of these things. Port over Yum/Dnf, or Apt. Any of these would help!

I found this thread a couple years ago which is semi-related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079096

Part of my gripes is Homebrew works fine for the first few things you want to install, but over time, it just falls apart. I just spent HOURS trying to resuscitate my packages because of dependency hell and it didn't clean things up right when deleting things and so on and so on.

Plus, I'm now left with the fact it upgraded a package and I needed the older version, and as best I can tell I can't downgrade it! (fwiw: elixir v1.15 is what I ended up with, but I must have elixir v1.14 for now; yet I can't find any way to downgrade).

And it's SLOW to run by default—I see you can configure something to be faster, but why isn't that just the norm?

Regardless, these problems are already solved by other much more large-scale and mature package managers! I'd almost give my left {insert body part} if somebody would just use Yum/DNF on a macos packaging ecosystem.

dv_dt 2 years ago |

Short answer: apt, yum, etc have aspects of tight integration with the distribution that make it a little more difficult (not impossible) to be a "sidecar" package manager like homebrew.

Does "brew install elixir@1.14" work for you? Homebrew has its problems, one of them is something like calling out versions doesn't always work. I use brew for packages where I generally only want the latest versions, but for finer control of multiple versions, I usually hand those packages over to asdf.

And for apt,yum etc, if you want bleeding edge releases, it's usually more lag, or repackaging work than the "sidecar" package managers.

srevenant 2 years ago | |

calling out versions: no, that's what kindof tipped me over the edge, as trying that and it wouldn't revert.

tlb 2 years ago |

The immediate reason is that Homebrew predates the other package managers you mention. It goes back to 2009.

srevenant 2 years ago | |

These package managers are much older. YUM came out in 2002 with yellowdog linux. APT as dpkg came out in 1998.