Comment by SnowLprd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SnowLprd | Hacker News Reader

I commend the RethinkDB folks for supporting Mac OS X explicitly. However, the .pkg installer, while handy for folks that prefer that installation method, installs to /usr/bin/ and /usr/share/ -- areas that are traditionally reserved for system tools provided by Apple. Sure, the DMG also contains an uninstall-rethinkdb.sh script, but I'm still left quite unwilling to kick the RethinkDB tires on my primary Mac workstation.

A better method, in my opinion, would be for the RethinkDB devs to contribute a Homebrew formula. That way everything would be installed into /usr/local/ by default, and updates would be a quick "brew upgrade rethinkdb" away. Am I the only one who would prefer that?

UPDATE: It seems they had originally planned on a Homebrew formula but thought the .pkg format was better. Clearly, I disagree with that. Want to offer both? Awesome. But if you're going to pick one or the other, I think Homebrew is the vastly superior method. More here: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/5

I for one am extremely happy for, on my new mac mini, being able to run sublime text 2, nodejs and npm (pkg), postgres (app) and the heroku toolbelt (pkg) without installing XCode.

The reason we did that is because /usr/local/bin isn't on the default path on many OS X systems, and we didn't want the installer to modify the user's PATH.

The thing about Homebrew is that it's great once you have it, but the user experience of actually installing it can be quite a pain, and we didn't want users who don't have it to have to go through the trouble. That being said, I still think it would be great to contribute a Homebrew formula.

Regarding the first point, which OS X systems are you referring to? The default PATH on Mountain Lion definitely contains /usr/local/bin, as you can see here:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

With respect, I don't share the view that installing Homebrew is a pain. Even the most inexperienced would-be developer can follow the very simple guide I (very coincidentally) posted yesterday: http://hackercodex.com/guide/mac-osx-mountain-lion-10.8-conf...

But it seems you guys are amenable to offering both the .pkg installer and a Homebrew formula, which would be great. :^)

Maybe I'm out of line here, but if you're going to be developing with RethinkDB you can probably figure out how to install Homebrew.

Are you folks open to that?

I'd be happy to do a pull request that does paths for homebrew and ports, so that either OS X party can be OK with it.

Definitely, would love those. We also had a few other people offerring to contribute a brew formula, so this'll likely happen in the next few days.

FYI, we just wanted to give people a one-click install on a clean OS X setup. We have no objects to supporting package managers, and were going to do that eventually (but hey, it's much easier for the issue list to grow than to shrink :)).

We're always very happy to receive community contributions. There may even be something in it for you... such as a USB drive. (You didn't hear about these drives from me though.)

I'm currently running rethinkdb via vagrant, and it's actually pretty great.

Personally I wouldn't install the pkg for the reasons stated by SnowLprd, but I definitely would switch to a homebrewed formula if it was available.

Great work on getting OSX support out so quickly!

When installing via .pkg, you can place a file in /etc/paths.d that adds to the path. For example, when you install in /usr/local/rethink/, you just add a file (e.g. /etc/paths.d/rethink) with one line: /usr/local/rethink/bin. Thats it, very easy.

Ah cool, thanks. Will do.

Would you like to leave a comment here if you update the package to install into /usr/local, I'd also prefer to use that directory.

Congrats on the new release! You are definitely doing a great job making developers love RethinkDB, feels like you already generated loads of interest.

I added an issue for this -- https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/171

I'll try to comment here as well when this is done!

You have a cleaner solution than my pull request hack. Thanks!

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