[martpie]

The usual non-productive rant.

What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project?

"It sucks" doesn't help anyone understand your frustrations and does not serve the message you're trying to share (let this one be valid or not).

Also, as everything that is open-source/free: if you hate it, don't use it, that's it. And let the people who appreciate it be productive and build awesome tools with it.

[biktor_gj]

Not parent, and I'm not going to say it sucks, the project takes a lot of work from a lot of people and I ain't the one pissing on other people's work, it definitely could use some improvements syntax wise though, What was it, brew install? Brew cask? Oh , now is brew cask install... or was it brew install --cask?

I get the analogy, but being a package manager, but was it really that bad to use 'brew install', 'brew update', and 'brew upgrade' for everything?

And it's true that it is a little frustrating at times when you don't use it for a while, you 'brew install xx' and wait 4 minutes until "Updating homebrew" finished with its dozens loops between shells, ruby etc doing its stuff (which I assume is refetching repos, but couldn't know it from the output)

I use it because it's the most common thing for mac, but I miss APT and DNF everytime I use it, not going to lie

[latexr]

> I get the analogy, but being a package manager, but was it really that bad to use 'brew install', 'brew update', and 'brew upgrade' for everything?

That’s how it works now. You only need `--cask` for (rare) disambiguations.

Homebrew Cask started as a different project (casks and formulae are still inherently different), so not having `brew cask` only became viable after the two projects merged.

> it is a little frustrating at times when you don't use it for a while, you 'brew install xx' and wait 4 minutes until "Updating homebrew" finished

Use `HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1`. Just don’t open an issue if something breaks and you didn’t update beforehand.

> which I assume is refetching repos, but couldn't know it from the output

`--verbose`.

[MarkyC4]

Homebrew (and CocoaPods, perhaps famously) uses github as a CDN for their package listings, syncing the git repos likely takes the most time here

[senjin]

Do you mean apt or apt-get or apt-get install or was it apt-install --get?

[Schalter]

even on old infrastructure its already apt and nothing else anymore. So they advanced.

[FireBeyond]

No, it's really not. apt-get works just fine on my current Ubuntu instances.

[w0m]

> What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project?

I think ~everything he stated is generally assumed true. I use Brew installed software every single day, and appreciate it. That doesn't put it above criticism though.

[bakedbeanz]

"brew fucking sucks" is just whining, not reasonable criticism IMHO

[bastardoperator]

There is no criticism in their statement though, just a generalized opinion/rant that doesn't point out single issue and is factually inaccurate.

[zimpenfish]

> doesn't point out single issue > is factually inaccurate.

I think these two might be somewhat contradictory.

[bastardoperator]

I don't, he said someone else would have filled the void, there was no void considering this project came after macports and fink

[curun1r]

> What prevents you to do it better then?

The mindshare of nearly the entire community that develops software for the Mac. Homebrew, the tool, is inferior to several other options, but developers of software treat it as the one true package manager on Mac. It's so frustrating to see projects offer it as the only supported way to install their software on Mac apart from building it from source.

Your question reads like "What prevents you from building a better social network than Facebook?" response to criticisms of that platform. And the answer is that in a tool like Facebook or Homebrew, all the value is in the ecosystem. Building a better tool is useless until everyone is using it. And no one will use it until everyone else is using it. It's a classic network effect, and it inhibits viable competition.

[Zarel]

I think the big difference is that Homebrew, unlike Facebook, is open-source (and doesn't have a huge trove of data to protect, leading them to go after third-party clients).

It's plausible that you could just write a front-end that keeps using the same remote package repository, that fixes everything you complain about.

I suppose it depends on what exactly your complaints are, but most of the complaints here (CLI, auto-update, etc) seem like they could be addressed with just a client fork.

[overgard]

> What prevents you to do it better then? What prevent you from forking it? Sharing improvement ideas? Contributing to the project?

Time?

> Also, as everything that is open-source/free: if you hate it, don't use it, that's it. And let the people who appreciate it be productive and build awesome tools with it.

This is such an unhealthy attitude. Just because something is free doesn't make it above criticism. Also doesn't mean that the maintainers don't benefit from their projects even if there isn't direct compensation (more career opportunities, visibility, etc.) This idea that we need to walk on eggshells around anyone that does any volunteer work is kinda absurd.

[FemmeAndroid]

> Just because something is free doesn’t make it above criticism.

What was being responded to wasn’t criticism. It was whining without any substance.