Homebrew

[Geoffroy Carrier]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 21:48, Scott Haneda <talklists at newgeo.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure why they felt they needed to position themselves as a MacPorts
> replacement; why not a Fink replacement?

Because it's source-based only, to start with? Because they consider
MacPorts as a better competitor than fink, which would be a
compliment, or closer to what they are trying to achieve?

> I also do not at all like that they symblink into a local dir from their
> prefix. That seems a recipe for disaster. The way MacPorts is isolated was a
> great design decision.

/usr/local was exactly meant to isolate the base system from stuff
installed on top. BSD ports system use /usr/local too. It is actually
the tradition MacPorts does not follow, a tradition which proved
efficient.
Anyway you get to choose, and they explain why /usr/local is their
default choice.
http://wiki.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/installation

Using symlinks is IMHO absolutely amazing. That's what alternatives
systems (from Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora/Red Hat, the later being, I must
precise for transparency, my employer) do when multiple
implementations are available for the same tool, and extending that to
versioning is actually what caught my eye as a brilliant design.

> I'm not seeing a list of Homebrew installer ports/packages. Do they at least
> have a working AMP stack, how is their php install and associated modules?
[...]
> Weird direction to take in releasing an alternative. Apparently someone out
> there does not like MacPorts :)

MacPorts being good does not mean one cannot do better... And taking
technical considerations aside, the Ruby active developers community
is huge (let's not compare to tcl), assuming making packages is in
most cases as easy as they claim, that could make it grow REALLY fast.
That's my experience as an ex big contributor to Arch Linux where most
source packages were shorter than 20 lines of shell with mostly simple
variable definitions and were most of the time lost on packaging was
spent building and uploading built packages...

> Who are the people behind this project?

It's an open source community project, built on a decentralized SCM
and with a very accessible codebase AFAIK. The whole point of those
choices is that it's not a point :)


I am thinking about using brew massively on top of a base Linux installation.
It sounds really nice to easily keep track of multiple versions, the
'brew link'/'brew unlink' makes switching very easy. Plus you don't
have to use their build system if you don't want to, just use the
proper prefix at installation time...

For someone playing with multiple versions of numerous projects
(including dev. versions I just don't want to spend time packaging),
this can be extremely convenient.

-- 
Pierre Carrier