[paulirish]

> At least on OS X, things are a little easier with Homebrew.

Absolutely. I adore Homebrew and it's ecosystem. Cask, in particular, is quite satisfying; gotta love installing a swath of neccessary fonts from the terminal. And, fwiw, the project is about to be on Homebrew, with no tap required: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/49040 Though getting it up was not quite as pain-free than our initial publishes to NPM.

The thing is: Homebrew solves the problem for just a portion of your audience. In diff-so-fancy's case, we've supported Linux and Windows from the get-go, the only hard part is getting it installed. NPM solves that problem really well, and I can't imagine any other installation technique being our recommendation for Windows/Linux going forward.

[rubiquity]

This only makes sense if you believe all Homebrew packages are written in JavaScript... which they aren't. Also I've been using Homebrew for about 4x as long as NPM and I have about 1/10th of the issues, so I'll just stick to the package manager that works.

[maxthegeek1]

You can use npm to distribute binaries.

[EvanPlaice]

That doesn't mean it's a good idea to.

NPM does a great job of distribiting development dependencies and Node.js applications.

It's not really intended for non-js binary builds and platform-specific dependencies.

You can always use NPM to install directly from specific repo release but you'll still have to have to include a native compile-to-platform step somewhere.

[joshmanders]

Linux Homebrew[0] can cover it for linux. Just need Windows Homebrew.

[0]: https://github.com/Linuxbrew/linuxbrew

[alviria]

Wait, what problem is this solving?

[idle_zealot]

  > Can install software to a home directory and so does not require sudo
  > Install software not packaged by the native distribution
  > Install up-to-date versions of software when the native distribution is old
  > Use the same package manager to manage both your Mac and Linux machines

From the "Features" section of the Github.

It could also likely be used so make a "safe" Linux distro, where the base system is mounted read only, with a writable home partition.

[jhanschoo]

> Cask

In my experience, cask is too fragile for its original use of installing binaries. Issues include

* applications expecting to be installed to /Applications

* applications with weird installation requirements/dependencies

* self-updater conflicting with cask's installation settings

* problems with detecting an installation (and uninstalling it) because the updated version's recipe installs differently or something.

For these reasons I now prefer to install applications by their official/expected/supported installation method.

On the other hand, I find brew very useful.

[davexunit]

Using npm to distribute a shell script, seriously? That's not such a good idea. I think what you want is something like the Autotools so your software may be installed with the standard './configure && make && make install'. This way, you make it easy for upstream distributions to package your software.

[matthewbauer]

Wouldn't that have issues with Windows? I'm not a huge fan of NPM but it works really well when you want to be cross platform.

[mwcampbell]

npm only works well for Windows if the program you're distributing is itself in JavaScript using Node. If you're using npm to distribute a shell script, then you still need a Unixy environment for Windows like Cygwin or MSYS, and in that case, autotools is probably no worse.