Perhaps they are talking about Homebrew the package manager [1].

[1] https://brew.sh

I wonder what people mean when they say "Homebrew is pretty great", I do not wonder what they mean when they say "Homebrew".

It does what it says on the tin and installs the plethora of software available on homebrew with a simple command, which is pretty great

They mean that they have an overall positive opinion of Homebrew, more than “not bad” but less than “amazing”.

As someone who would readily say that Homebrew is pretty great, this is exactly how I feel about Homebrew.

For example people do not use homebrew to install python3 on a fresh install of mac os and get a python that spews a bunch of messages to stderr about the version of libc6.so and cannot speak TLS.

It only upgrades PostgreSQL 3 major versions up alongside without asking.

Think this issue was fixed a few years ago

Not sure I agree, when I use brew it still regularly updates random unconnected crap through multiple major releases. And of course it takes ages doing so

I was referring to your postgresql example, those became rudimentary @versioned packages

It's plenty solid, and there's a good library of packages on there. It's a package manager, doesn't take more than that.

I mean, it installs stuff more or less reliably for me so I’d say that’s pretty great. I’m sure it has issues (I’ve had problems trying to install old versions of packages for example) but I don’t think I’ve ever had “brew install <whatever>” fail to install what I wanted

I can use it to get stuff I need to do work and I don't remember the last time I couldn't. Upgrades sometimes leave me broken but it's usually ironed out fast because everyone is using it. If my dependencies are that locked down I'm using docker and special environments anyway. Linux can get tedious with upgrades breaking or dependency mismatches. Homebrew is probably the largest homogenous community - if you're doing something relatively popular there will be a lot of noise when stuff breaks. Linux is spread out across various distros/repos/package managers, overlap of users with your problem is a lot smaller.

Beats all the package management experiences I've had on Windows, admittedly I have not tried to use Windows for work for >1 year.

Homebrew is available for Linux as well since approx 3yrs now. I've been using it without issues https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux

OK but what I like about homebrew on mac is that when I'm having an issue with "popular stack X broke after updating" it's probably me and >10k other people out there, so by the time I hit the problem it's already under investigation on GH. I'm not sure the same would apply to homebrew on Linux - even if you ignore the differences between distros - how popular is homebrew on linux and linux desktop in comparison ?

I wish more of those 10k people would help get others off of a package manager that is so fragile and convoluted that updating so often leads to popular things breaking.

Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.

I’ve never experienced a broken homebrew and I’ve used Mac for years

Neither have I. My main complaint is that it's slow.

The comment was in response to parent's stated complaint, namely having to wait for someone else to resolve issues with popular packages being broken after an update, which has been the experience of more than one user.

I’m curious what’s the benefit? I use homebrew as a Linux package manager for MacOS. On Linux I just use the distros package manager

If you need to build something from source (my use-case: Vim, so I can change which language bindings exist in the resulting build) it can sometimes be a lot easier than cloning and using the "raw" C/Make build system.

Also, assuming a downstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, what's in Homebrew is likely a more up to date package. You could fiddle with adding/using Debian testing or some PPA, or... you could just use Homebrew.

(FWIW: I use Arch and the AUR on my desktop Linux installs these days, and it's essentially the same process. But still using Homebrew on the Mac, and occasionally in Linux when I'm not on a desktop)

The experience is really seamless, mostly it just works… which IMO is nothing special as they mostly support installing the latest and maybe a couple of other versions, and software that requires weird stuff will likely be packaged in a self contained way.

They mean they haven’t tried another package manager for Mac, like pkgsrc or macports.

I switched to it after using both Fink and macports and it was the first time I felt like I had a package manager as reliable to apt on Linux. Both Macports and Fink would routinely break my whole system by putting extra versions of system libraries where other applications could find them. Since, I’ve switched to nix.