Hacker News Reader

Comment by filmgirlcw | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I keep having to explain this to colleagues. For some stuff, it’s just going to take time.

And I can also envision that certain packages might not get updated, necessitating a fork to patch them for M1.

I’m interested in how homebrew and others will handle that (so official package x chooses not to patch/accept a patch for whatever reason, leading to a fork of package x with a patch applied), presumably to avoid namespace collisions/not giving the user what they want, there could be an error message that states that an ARM64 version doesn’t officially exist but links it to the fork and gives the option to install that instead. And then there could be a flag to always allow linked-replacements if an official patch doesn’t exist.

View on HN

Homebrew's policy is to not apply patches that upstream doesn't accept, though I do notice that they are sometimes applying patches to the build systems themselves to patch in some of the paths to include files living deep inside the macOS SDK.

Given that policy I would assume that such a package might die until somebody forks it and takes on responsibility for maintenance.

Homebrew is about building and installing upstream packages, not about installing and maintaining custom forks of packages.

It's worth noting, btw, that this is another major difference between Homebrew and MacPorts. MacPorts maintains tons of their own patches, whether to make software work at all or just to add support for older or newer OS's.

... which is a blessing and a curse: When they are doing a good job, that's perfect because it means that some software which wouldn't run correctly now runs correctly.

When they are doing a bad job, they might anger maintainers ("I didn't add this bug - this was added by macports - complain to them!"), or they might introduce additional security issues not present in the upstream package (see the Debian openssl bug from 2008)

It might also mean that you're not getting the latest versions of upstream packages because adding those patches and rebasing them on top of upstream changes takes time.

Being close to upstream was a selling-point of homebrew back in the days when it was just a collection of scripts to make it easier to build original source distributions of common Unix software.

since this is homebrew we are talking about the solution will be whatever is the most user hostile.

Sorry if you have that impression. If you’re interested in a constructive discussion, feel free to give an example and tell me how you think we should handle it better in the future.

You proved yourselves to be untrustworthy by opting everyone into analytics using Google and hiding the notice in lots of terminal output. You guys doubled down on that by refusing to reconsider, saying unless you were a contributor to the project, your opinion was irrelevant. Mike McQuaid's responses as a representative of the project were user hostile, all while he tried to paint himself as the victim of abuse over the matter.

If you want to regain my trust, remove the analytics function, swear off such things forever, and expel Mike McQuaid from the project. But I doubt that will happen, so MacPorts it is. And I'll encourage everyone I know to use it rather than Homebrew.

Again, sorry you feel that way about Homebrew’s analytics. I think we’ve learned a lot from our mistakes here. If the way the analytics notice is implemented now is still a no-go for you, I can’t blame you for moving on. MacPorts is a fine package manager, too.

One thing I still want to point out though: whatever we do, we do it in good faith and with the best of intentions for both our users and ourselves.

The only gripe I have ever had with Homebrew is the /usr/local "do yourself a favor" prefix, due to its collision with so many 3rd-party installers. But that's now been fixed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com