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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

And at this point the first instruction for any OSX user who downloads and compiles anything is "Install Homebrew"

The Homebrew installation process uses the system git.

Yep, since Homebrew requires the Xcode Developer Tools to be installed (which of course includes the outdated Git).

Yes, but if Homebrew is malicious, you'd have more problems than a specially-crafted repository that exploits a git vulnerability. You are installing something that has all user access rights.

Can you inunstall XCode again once you have installed a compiler, toolchain, and git via Homebrew?

You can just install the command line tools without xcode. From those tools, most can be replaced with their homebrew versions so you only need them for bootstrapping. But if you want to do hardware- or OS X related development, you will need to keep the tools around. CUDA, for example, needs clang et. all.

They don't take much space, though, and the toolchain is treated a bit better by Apple than utilities like git, vim etc.

I don't know about homebrew, but macports has clang and other toolchain stuff, so I think it might be possible to uninstall Xcode after installing all necessary tools through macports?

You _could_ get recent git by some other means prior to installing homebrew. Anything short of compiling from source wouldn't require ever installing XCLT.

Except for those who have used it and refuse to use it again.

There are prebuilt binaries of up to date git distributed via .pkg. The yeast infection that is Homebrew is unnecessary

That's kind've harsh. What's the issue? Homebrew was about the best option that's existed on OSX for a few years now I thought...

The dependency management is a joke, compile-by-default means it's slow as hell.

I look forward to your release of something better

So your world view is that only those with a competing solution are allowed to identify issues in something?

If you're going to be that snarky and nonconstructive about it, you're going to get snarky and nonconstructive comments back. Or at the very least, you're not going to inspire any thoughtful and interesting observations from anyone.

Most commonly-used dependencies are bottled (precompiled) these days.

Except the dependency management solution is terrible, unless you want to compile everything yourself.

For example: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/issues/35995

Personally I use MacPorts.

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