[lucideer]

> more credibility

I would say the opposite. Homebrew isn't a broadly well-respected project from a purely engineering perspective (i.e. by anyone who's engaged with it in earnest) - it gets contributions because it has user-capture / network effect, but there's a lot of contributors would would prefer to be publishing packages on a more nicely stewarded platform.

[shepherdjerred]

Are you kidding? I love Homebrew.

I install it on my Linux devices too. It allows me to easily install up-to-date versions of just about any software I care about.

[lucideer]

You're a user - I'm purely referring to contributors.

It's clearly gained popularity for good reasons - it's an API that is very user-oriented, with reasonably good UX for most people. The downsides are mainly related to issues users don't see (i.e. security).

[ptx]

What are some of the security issues? (Just curious. I don't use Homebrew.)

[lucideer]

Homebrew adds a location to your $PATH that is writable by unprivileged users. This means any non-root process has privileges to mask any binary on your system. They do this in the name of "convenience" - so that the Homebrew process can install apps without the user entering their password every time.

[shepherdjerred]

You're right, I misread your comment.

[packetlost]

I wonder how good Nix support is on MacOS these days...

[lucideer]

I recently switched from MacPorts to Homebrew & from previous trials of Nix, MacPorts support is well ahead of Nix.

I used MacPorts for many years without many issues - only recently just started to get a little too frustrated with some new utils that were Homebrew-only & finally capitulated. So you can get very far with MacPorts (& it's a far better system than brew).

Be great to see something gain traction over Homebrew but I have a feeling many devs out there will only ever bother publishing on a single distribution platform for MacOS (whatever happens to be most popular).

[cpach]

Isn’t it best if the application developers just release their application on GitHub or similar, then package maintaners can package the software for their specific package manager? That’s how it works for many Linux distros, e.g. Debian etc etc.

[lucideer]

> That’s how it works for many Linux distros, e.g. Debian etc etc.

Yes and no. It's certainly true of most packages but the smaller the package, the more likely it is that the distro package maintainer will be [a/the] maintainer of the original project, even with Debian.

The same is true of Homebrew, etc. - most of the package maintainers aren't the original project maintainers, which is ultimately why MacPorts support is so comprehensive despite not having anywhere near the same user capture as Homebrew. But the places you see frustrating gaps will always be at the edges, where it may be the original project creator creating a Homebrew package & no-one packaging it for anything else.

[brirec]

Pretty good, but you might still want to defer to Homebrew to install some software. Nix-Darwin _can_ drive Homebrew and basically manage its packages declaratively.