Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adidalal 3561 days ago
Just wanted to highlight that as of this release, all the core code for Homebrew-Cask (the sister project for GUI apps) has been (re)integrated into the Brew codebase. This should allow for tighter integration between the two and a renewed focus on making installing GUI apps as painless as possible!

From a user/developer perspective, we've created a command line utility (`cask-repair`) to make version bumps as painless as possible. Would love to see more people using it [0], and we welcome suggestions and PRs (we have a few long-standing issues that have gone unaddressed, and fresh eyes are always good!)

[0] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/CONTRI...

1 comments

Looking forward to checking this out. One issue I have run into with homebrew is that due to varying packaging choices as a project grows, I've seen stuff move back and forth from brew core to cask to neither, and the old ones stick around at the outdated version so you have to be careful when you tell people to install the thing (seen this happen with terraform for example, which a month ago when I last checked existed as a year-old version in a cask, a few months old version in core, and the current version wasn't available in either).

It might be cool to also allow some kind of process for marking packages as deprecated and showing a warning or confirmation prompt if you try to install it, for the cases when maintainers start packaging in some different way that can't be supported by homebrew.

We do have a `deprecated` caveat, but we rely on users to bring up that fact, as there's no way the maintainers can keep track of the status of every Cask.

There's also a fairly large push and discussion about removing duplication between Homebrew core and Homebrew Cask, so you should see things improve. There should also be Formula -> renamed Cask migration at some point, the issue has been raised in brew-evolution. (We have basic Cask <-> Formula support already).

Re: terraform specifically, looks like it's now in core, and `brew cask terraform` will know to do `brew install terraform` automatically.