Hacker News Reader

Comment by SmileyKeith | Hacker News Reader

There are a few things I don't like about this homebrew-cask. My biggest issue currently, now that the installation path can be specified as /Applications instead of ~/Applications[0], is that it makes a symbolic link from its install location to the Applications folder. Since the standard for GUI applications on OS X is to have some built in update system, I just want the applications to be copied to my install location and left alone. This means it would only automate the install process which I think would be better then managing their lifecycle.

[0]: https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/blob/master/USAGE.md...

View on HN

I believe if you're going the Homebrew route you're accepting the cask's versions of things as a means to synchronize installations. This could be handle for teams that need to be using the same versions of specific libraries or apps, system administrators who want to manage upgrades paths, etc.

It could also be as simple as "that's the way it works because that's how homebrew works". It's all symlinks, and I personally am a fan because if I want to cleanup what's been done with Homebrew it's very easy.

I do completely understand your point, and agree to a certain extent, but I'm sure there are situations where you wouldn't want things simply copied and left to run/update on their own.

I don't think this synchronizes installations since the forumla[0] are overwritten with each update. If someone updates one of them the specific version you downloaded elsewhere will not be downloaded again. I definitely understand why homebrew works this way, but the logic for symlinking the applications is all in this extension[1] so this could easily be changed. I agree that symlinks is better for tools typical to homebrew but for this it's not like it symlinks your preference files so you're not actually cleaning up any junk if you uninstall the application through cask, it's the equivalent of just dragged it to the trash. Also the applications will still attempt to update so it's not managing versions that way either.

[0]: https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/tree/master/Casks [1]: https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/blob/master/lib/cask...

> I just want the applications to be copied to my install location and left alone.

If it's a use case that would be useful to people, this is a mode of operation I would definitely be willing to include in the project. Feel free to open an issue (or even better - a PR!) with the idea. :)

I've thought about this, previously I've changed this by just replacing your /bin/ln calls to mv but I think that attempting to add this to the tool may cause some confusion. Obviously it wouldn't be the default behavior and you'd have to enable it probably through the ENV variable, but this would render all commands but install virtually useless I think which wouldn't make much sense in its current state I don't think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com