Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

I've stayed away from Homebrew because of its insistence on taking over /usr/local. I understand the reasoning, but I use /usr/local for my own installs and Homebrew doesn't play nicely in that kind of mixed environment. I would use it if it defaulted to /opt/homebrew or something similar.

I'm looking forward to this new package manager alternative.

View on HN

You can install Homebrew in a different place if you want. I have an install inside my home directory.

How does it work in practice? I tried it about a year ago and it still stomped on /usr/local for some packages. If I remember correctly, that was due in part to the package not making it easy to install elsewhere, but Homebrew didn't handle it well.

It always worked fine for me. /usr/local is not even writable by the user I normally use, so it would have caused an error if Homebrew tried writing there - which it didn't. If you're seeing issues when installing to alternate locations, file a bug report.

It definitely shouldn't do that. Most likely that's a fault with the way the formula or Makefile is written, like hardcoding `/usr/local` instead of using $PREFIX.

Isn't there a way to have Homebrew monitor a "make install" operation so that Homebrew can manage (or at least be aware of) your own installs?

Possibly. I'll check it out again when I have a chance. Perhaps there have been improvements in the past year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com