[woodruffw]

I’ve posted a variant of this answer on other threads about Homebrew, but to summarize:

1. Homebrew is entirely maintained by open source contributors. Keeping thousands of packages up to date is a significant task even before considering maintaining the packaging core itself, and analytics serve as both a warning system and hard data for package importance, instability, etc.

2. Homebrew is somewhat unique among package managers because of its relationship with the host OS: it has no say over how macOS behaves, and needs to adapt quickly to changes made unilaterally by Apple. Analytics help detect that kind of top-down breakage.

FD: Current member of Homebrew, former maintainer.

[heywoodlh]

Homebrew is one of those tools that actually makes MacOS a decent Unix workstation for engineering (often, it feels like in spite of Apple). Without brew, MacOS would not be an OS I would even consider for my personal machines -- but I really enjoy MacOS now that it's on the M1/M2.

Although, admittedly, I use Nix-Darwin to manage my Homebrew apps.

Thanks for your contributions to Homebrew :)

[vin047]

Used to feel this way until I discovered MacPorts. So much faster than brew and prefer it placing everything in /opt and not relying on system binaries. Now I only use homebrew to manage Casks and a few esoteric binaries (really rare).

[alwillis]

brew on Apple Silicon Macs also install everything in /opt.

[vin047]

Yup noticed this. Which just reinforces my belief that MacPorts is better designed than homebrew.

[illiac786]

well that specific advantage from a design point of view is gone for sure. What other design advantages do you see?

[woodruffw]

Thank you for your kind words! The maintainers deserve nearly all of the credit; these days, I mostly just do a bit of security automation stuff and defend their work when it comes up here :-)