I don't agree with everything that Homebrew does, but the primary maintainers are visible, vocal and very opinionated. They have shown credibility and earnt my trust over the years given it is a crucial entry point to potential malware to my system.
Homebrew has continued to improve performance each major version. It's certainly a lot quicker nowadays than 5 years ago. I want reliability and safety in a package manager, speed is nice to have.
I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.
100% agree on your comment. For a package manager, speed is aspiration but security and reliability are basic requirements. And the credibility is a big plus. Today anyone can build a package manager in a week with AI, but once the system grows, how is the team going to manage? This is where credibility matters.
> If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.
How is Homebrew fundamentally different (as of today) - they vibe code. For example, the new app BrewUI is vibe coded, Claude is #2 contributor.
Is it smart to deprecate everything the minute Apple sunsets their OS version?
This is not a smart package manager, its a manager for the “dumb” masses, that need to be saved and protected from themselves by forcing them into the next walled garden, so to speak…
"Alternative to homebrew (the CLI utility)" -> "Frontend to Homebrew (the package system)".
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.
I tried zerobrew before the original author archived it. It really was faster. There's even a mise plugin for it, but the plugin for it wasn't great to be honest. Caused some wild slowdowns on my prompt. I think it's cos zb or maybe the plugin loads some huge Homebrew version file every time it's invoked. Didn't look too much into it, but it was killed my prompt on slower connections
What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?
Why would one care for 100x faster homebrew? it's a tool you use every now and then, you rarely install or upgrade 1000 things, and when you do it doesn't really matter if it takes 10s or 0.1s
- homebrew maintainers wouldn't be interested in accepting this as a PR unless it's actually maintainable, as they're the ones who would have to take responsibility for maintaining it going forward. And it needs to integrate well with the existing architecture, be well-designed and well-documented, have a migration plan and fallbacks for esoteric use cases that are currently supported but won't work with this. OPs implementation works, but is some combination of hacked together / slopcoded and it would take a lot of work to get it into a shape that could be accepted upstream. OP isn't interested in (or isn't capable of) putting in that work.
- "I made zerobrew, with 7.6K GitHub stars and thousands of users" sounds more impressive than "I made a contribution to homebrew that sped up package installation by up to 100x" despite the latter being both harder and more useful.
Good! I want to be able to trust and rely on homebrew, authorization, authentication, infra, os and other _crucial_ software. The bar should be really high and I appreciate the efforts of open source maintainers now more than ever.
Another recommendation for mise, in my case it has already fully replaced brew, stow and direnv since I started using it this January, and it has many more features I'm not using yet (secret management, tasks, automation, ...), all from a single rust binary.
Also, unlike homebrew/linuxbrew, the install path for apps can be set to anywhere and is fully portable (it's all relative symlinks).
So far I never had any issue with it or any backward incompatibilities when upgrading, despite the very frequent releases and constant new features. The developer also seems very security minded (he immediately added a "minimum release age" feature for all apps when the trivy github action debacle was made public)
Oh! I thought it was a wrapper around brew so you could list all your tools in one place, but you’re right, it bypasses homebrew altogether. Nice.
I’ve recently started using mise to manage dotfiles, including its own config, and sync them on all my systems. Now I can easily have all the same packages installed everywhere. I am loving mise a lot these days.
I wonder how the industry has not yet learned to use ASD-STE100 Simple Technical English for documentation. It makes it so much more polished and so much less AI-sloppy.
I don't think MacPorts users have those kind of problems.
Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.
The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.
> Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink
Isn't that exactly the benefit of homebrew? It installs in one folder and symlinks
And my guess, it would've been much easier to remove extra symlinks you don't need from is package manifest rather than rewrite the whole system
Same. When they explained why they assumed and required /usr and/or /usr/local was owned by steve or bill or whatever, with a straight face, I was gobsmacked and never touched it again.
Like, how did people so ignorant come to manage such a project? I excuse most of the users but not the authors who have the balls to call themselves "engineers" on top.
I wouldn't be suprised if they weren't the very reason shortly after that Apple took over ownership and brute force OS control over those dirs.
It's just the same on Linux though. Don't touch anything under /usr but /usr/local or you will run into issues, third-party software uses /usr/local, and that is why Macports ended up in /opt/local - guaranteed free of collisions.
Most of the slowness in brew comes from download times, so I don't really need this I think? I never thought "brew is too slow" except when it's downloading.
But I always thought I don't need pnpm untill I started using it, so. I don't know.
(I always knew I needed actually good python package manager before uv came, though.)
Homebrew has continued to improve performance each major version. It's certainly a lot quicker nowadays than 5 years ago. I want reliability and safety in a package manager, speed is nice to have.
I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.
AI may make it easy to clone or port something to a new language but it will later need a dedicated human to put in a shift and fine tune it.
So unless you are ready to keep jumping to the newest, it's better to stay with the trusted for now.
How is Homebrew fundamentally different (as of today) - they vibe code. For example, the new app BrewUI is vibe coded, Claude is #2 contributor.
Does this scream "smart humans"?
Is it smart to deprecate everything the minute Apple sunsets their OS version?
This is not a smart package manager, its a manager for the “dumb” masses, that need to be saved and protected from themselves by forcing them into the next walled garden, so to speak…
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.
Ok, but why a new app for that instead of a PR for brew?
- homebrew maintainers wouldn't be interested in accepting this as a PR unless it's actually maintainable, as they're the ones who would have to take responsibility for maintaining it going forward. And it needs to integrate well with the existing architecture, be well-designed and well-documented, have a migration plan and fallbacks for esoteric use cases that are currently supported but won't work with this. OPs implementation works, but is some combination of hacked together / slopcoded and it would take a lot of work to get it into a shape that could be accepted upstream. OP isn't interested in (or isn't capable of) putting in that work.
- "I made zerobrew, with 7.6K GitHub stars and thousands of users" sounds more impressive than "I made a contribution to homebrew that sped up package installation by up to 100x" despite the latter being both harder and more useful.
It’s sad, but also makes some sense.
Nobody wants to maintain someone else’s AI slop when they could do their own version of the slop.
Good! I want to be able to trust and rely on homebrew, authorization, authentication, infra, os and other _crucial_ software. The bar should be really high and I appreciate the efforts of open source maintainers now more than ever.
So far I never had any issue with it or any backward incompatibilities when upgrading, despite the very frequent releases and constant new features. The developer also seems very security minded (he immediately added a "minimum release age" feature for all apps when the trivy github action debacle was made public)
I’ve recently started using mise to manage dotfiles, including its own config, and sync them on all my systems. Now I can easily have all the same packages installed everywhere. I am loving mise a lot these days.
Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.
The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.
Isn't that exactly the benefit of homebrew? It installs in one folder and symlinks And my guess, it would've been much easier to remove extra symlinks you don't need from is package manifest rather than rewrite the whole system
Like, how did people so ignorant come to manage such a project? I excuse most of the users but not the authors who have the balls to call themselves "engineers" on top.
I wouldn't be suprised if they weren't the very reason shortly after that Apple took over ownership and brute force OS control over those dirs.
https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers
But I always thought I don't need pnpm untill I started using it, so. I don't know.
(I always knew I needed actually good python package manager before uv came, though.)
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew-rs
Bruh…