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A comment on Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?. Parent comment

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.
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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
That will:

- 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.

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