Re:Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
by bpye on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @02:47PM
(#29085740)
This is neat! I wonder if there would be value in having a repo for only GUI applications, equivalent to casks. I suppose it works best when the application doesn’t also auto-update, which many do.
Re:Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
by chriswarbo on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @06:03PM
(#29088038)
> I suppose it works best when the application doesn’t also auto-update, which many do.
Yes, the update prompts get annoying (auto-updaters don't work since everything's read-only). I use niv to update things, e.g.
$ niv update firefox -v94.0
- Update firefox's version field in nix/sources.json
- Update its url field based on its template (for Firefox that's "https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/<version>/mac-E...")
- Fetch that file to the Nix store
- Update firefox's sha256 field to match that file's
Running nix-build will create a new system package, and the nix/sources.json changes can be committed to git.
I use the following Nix function to install GUI applications https://github.com/cmacrae/.nixpkgs/blob/d4b51eb414b0edaffae...
It doesn't work for everything, but I use it at the moment for Amethyst, DBeaver, DockerDesktop, Emacs, Firefox, iTerm2, Postman, Slack and VNCViewer.