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0 pointsCamJN5y ago0 comments

It certainly is a bad thing, it has led to them making a lot of user hostile changes that have made Homebrew a much worse project than it used to be. This article describes just one example of the kind of things that are considered ok by the Homebrew maintainers.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

mynameisvlad5y ago· 1 in thread

Once again, they're volunteers doing unpaid work. They're not beholden to anyone's interests except their own.

If you don't like their decisions, you're free to criticize them, but to imply that (rightly) putting themselves above their users is a bad thing is an entirely different beast when they don't owe anything to their users.

At the end of the day, if you don't like their decisions, you're free to work towards becoming a maintainer and make your voice heard, or fork it and do whatever you want and think is right. But nobody owes you or any other user anything unless you explicitly are paying them for the time and effort.

Hackbraten5y ago

You can even fork an individual formula by creating a tap, adding the one formula you disagree with, and customize it to your heart’s content.

The only drawback is that the Homebrew organization won’t support, update, or build bottles for, custom taps.

woodruffw5y ago· 1 in thread

To be absolutely clear: what Homebrew is doing here is consistent with what every other system package manager does. If you've ever done `do-release-upgrade` to bump your Ubuntu LTS, you'll have run into the exact same problem.

The only difference is that Homebrew doesn't have a stable system distribution to pin to (we're not Apple, and we have no say over macOS's development), so we make upgrade decisions for packages like Python based on their stability with our packaged ecosystem. It's a poor practice to use your system Python distribution for any sort of virtualized development environment, and Homebrew behaves identically to every other system package manager in that regard.

Please keep in mind that we're a community of volunteers answering to millions of users. Your idea of "user hostile" is our idea of "simple for the sake of preserving our sanity."

CamJNOP5y ago

No other package manager I've used automatically performs destructive actions on a package installation without asking me, homebrew does. But aside from that, homebrew used to be much nicer, it had options on formulae, it worked with the system ruby instead of installing its own periodically, it allowed patches that improved system integration even if they made the resulting binary less command line focused (for example emacs has macOS specific patches locked behind building the gui app).

And yeah, it's the homebrew maintainer's project, but when you're in a position to help people or make their life worse, it's immoral to do the latter.

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