Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

Re:Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021? by pxc on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @10:44AM (#29082020)

> Also, the maintainers have a super weird aversion to everything that is "too simple". I've seen packages rejected because "the build process was too simple and there are no dependencies". The excuse was that "users can build it themselves". This is not for silly stuff random people wrote on weekend, this is for 20 year old tools used in production written in C.

wtf? What could be the possible motivation for this? Is their build farm really straining or something?

Can you point me to this example?

> I'm also using download links straight from language websites (Rust, Ruby, Python, DotNet, Haskell).

this sounds downright medieval to me, like why even use macOS for development if the software management tools are so bad that that's what you're doing

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Re:Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021? by ratww on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @12:29PM (#29083556)

> this sounds downright medieval to me, like why even use macOS for development if the software management tools are so bad that that's what you're doing

Because it's only one tool that really sucks: Brew. For the languages I specified, it works quite well. Even using C++ with vendored dependencies works better than average in macOS for me.

For most of those languages I mentioned, Brew already offloads the real installation and updating of the language itself to a language manager (via rvm/rbenv, nvm, pyenv, rustup, whatever), so it doesn't make a difference, except without Brew I get a more stable, officially supported, environment.

Also, DotNet was a Cask until a few months ago, so they effectively were just downloading something from the official website just like me.

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