Comment by _2d30 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _2d30 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Brew is only slightly a mess, in my experience.

I've installed brew both in the historical /usr/local location as well as the future home of /opt/homebrew. I then created these two aliases:

  alias armbrew="/opt/homebrew/bin/brew"
  alias intbrew="arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew"

My PATH selects for programs installed in the /opt/homebrew location first and then /usr/local. I try to install with the ARM version first with `armbrew install -s <PKG>` and if it fails, I move to using the `intbrew` alias as normal. I haven't really had any issues.

It's obviously still messy but not in a way that is too bad!

I've been using MacPorts instead of Homebrew. It seems further ahead on the Darwin AArch64 transition. About 80% of things that I've tried have worked without trouble. Unfortunately, ffmpeg wasn't one of them. I got that working yesterday with libx264 and libx265 integration. Oddly, libx265 installs fine under MacPorts but libx264 doesn't. But I was able to download the latest from git and build it and copy it manually to /opt/local.

Running iTerm/Terminal in Rosetta allows it to work without issue, it's the best solution until more packages work natively under ARM.

Duplicate iTerm.app, right click & "Get Info", check "Open in Rosetta". Now install homebrew how you would on an Intel Mac and everything will work.

This certainly works but then everything I install runs in Rosetta2. I'd prefer to run as much native as possible which is what my "two brew" solution gives me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com