Hacker News Reader

Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> Even Homebrew works pretty nicely

It always surprises me when people cite homebrew as a plus rather than a minus in these discussions. Compared to the experience I have with Linux package managers, I've found homebrew to be extraordinarily slow even at the best of times. A simple "brew update" will generally take at least 30 seconds; in that time on something like pacman, I'll usually not only have already finished fetching the list of updates but also actually performing the upgrades, and that's updating my entire system, not just a few userspace packages that I have installed. I can understand that some people prefer MacOS and I don't think they're wrong for doing so, but it's hard for me to believe that someone has given Linux a fair shot when they cite package management as something that Macias does better.

View on HN

In my experience this is partly because Homebrew has steadily moved to a "knows better than you" stance and every time you ask it to do one thing, it goes off and does a bunch of other things first.

MacPorts is well worth a spin if you're on a Mac and have trouble with Homebrew. I switched sometime last year and am very happy. I think I've actually been using it more because I know it's not going to be a pain every time.

I've been a MacPorts user since the days of Fink vs. MacPorts and tried and failed to use brew many times.

The biggest argument at the beginning for Homebrew over MacPorts was binary distribution and now MacPorts has that and can still compile custom versions if necessary.

MacPorts is always the first thing I install on a new Mac and has been for over 15 years. The several times I've seriously tried Homebrew, I get frustrated (terrible jargon, missing packages, spewing files all over my system, lax security) and go back to MP.

I've been using Homebrew for years and, although I've not had any major problems with it, I do find the slowness irritating. And also the fact it tends to ridiculous bloat by keeping previous versions of everything installed, unless you remember to do some spring cleaning every now and then.

I'm up for giving MacPorts a go. But is there a pain-free way to transition between Homebrew and MacPorts, without having to reinstall everything over again? I've installed a load of stuff with Homebrew, over the years and don't fancy having to pick through it all again to try and remember what I installed and why.

While Homebrew is absolutely slow, the experience of package management on macOS (homebrew gets you bleeding-edge versions of the crap you install, whereas Apple manages the system and keeps it stable) is IMO better than Linux where the choice of stable vs. bleeding-edge is systemwide.

Obviously requires significant setup, but this[1] seems to solve the issue you are talking about on linux.

[1] https://bedrocklinux.org/

Yeah sigh, homebrew had definitely slowed down in recent years.

> in that time on something like pacman

If you're using Pacman (and presumably Arch or some derivative), that might explain your better experience on Linux. You're on a rolling distro so you get up to date packages (and I believe AUR gets things even quicker).

Homebrew is much closer to that rolling always-up-to-date (within a day or two usually) experience than Apt or Yum on Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora (most people's linux experience), where you have a choice between packages that are 3-6 months out of date or hunting around on the web for a 3rd-party repository to add which contains more up to date packages.

Homebrew can be slow. But the fact that I can `brew install X` or `brew upgrade X` and get on with something else while it's doing it's thing means it doesn't generally take up much of my time.

> Homebrew is much closer to that rolling always-up-to-date (within a day or two usually) experience than Apt or Yum on Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora (most people's linux experience), where you have a choice between packages that are 3-6 months out of date or hunting around on the web for a 3rd-party repository to add which contains more up to date packages

It still has a centralized list of the versions of the packages it supports (on github) though, right? I feel like it should be able to get this list with a single HTTP request to the Github API; I don't see why having a faster or slower schedule to update the packages should affect how long it takes to actually download the list of updated packages with `brew update`.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com