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by papermule 3083 days ago
Devils advocate: I’m the other kind of Mac user who hates homebrew and refuses to use it. Give me a package or bash script to run!
2 comments

What are your problems with homebrew? I have my share of them, but I wonder if your problems are more community oriented, MacOS oriented, or brew itself.
(Not the parent)

I used to love Homebrew, but I recently uninstalled it from my machines and went back to MacPorts. This was motivated by the discovery that the lead maintainer of Homebrew is a huge jerk. The tl;dr is he deliberately took offense at inadvertent rudeness in someone's GitHub comment that they had already edited to remove (he recognized this and quoted the original form from the email anyway), then subsequently threatened to ban them from the Homebrew GitHub organization for politely asking that their issue be reopened, and when I pointed this out, he banned me and deleted the relevant comments.

Given that he self identifies as “often a dick” this doesn’t seem too surprising:

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

That's Max Howell. He's got his own set of issues, but he's not the lead maintainer of Homebrew anymore. The person I'm talking about is Mike McQuaid.
I used Homebrew back when it wouldn’t work without chowning /usr/local/bin. I’m not sure if that is still a requirement, but it did leave a bitter after taste.

Beside that, I like to install packages from their canonical source. That could mean installing Go from golang.org to MariaDB from mariadb.org. It’s simple to compare sha256 checksums, which I suspect is also possible with Homebrew, I just don’t know how.

How about a ruby script to run instead of a bash script? With perhaps a shared repository of them that you could use? Hmm...