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by FnuGk 1216 days ago
> It’s only happened twice in more than a decade, but I still have the feeling that I was better off compiling stuff manually and cultivating a tidy /usr/local/bin like I did in early 2000s. But it’s probably rose-colored glasses and I’d definitively never take the time these days.

thats exactly what homebrew does.

1 comments

A lot of Homebrew packages are pre-compiled binaries ("bottles" produced by Homebrew) that are pretty much just downloaded and untarred onto your system.

The Homebrew formulas' are what's used to produce those binaries, or - if there's no pre-compiled one available - that's when it's compiled live on your system.

Seems like a decent tradeoff, as otherwise installing (say) Qt could take an hour+, since that's a bit of a monster to compile. :)

The problem is that every time you install something it will update a gazillion dependencies because there is a minor version difference in a library I don't even use. And of course I did not ask for those binaries to be upgraded.

When I do a yum install, 99% of the cases it just add the package I need. And won't mess with my dev tools.

I believe you need to set the envvar HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE to avoid that problem.
I always encourage folks to read over the environment section of the manpage, as it's extremely helpful: https://docs.brew.sh/Manpage#environment
Sane defaults are important tough.