[Scramblejams]

Cool project, good luck with it!

If I may surface one use case: Several years ago I had to manage a bunch of Macs for CI jobs. The build process (Unreal's UAT) didn't support running more than one build process at a time, and Docker was really slow, so I'd hoped to use different user accounts to bypass that and get some parallelization gains. Homebrew made that very difficult with its penchant for system-wide installs. So a feature request: I'd love to see a competitive package manager that limits itself to operating somewhere (overridable) in the user's home directory.

[alexykn]

Initial idea for this really came from my dayjob too, we have macs but no way to centrally manage them. The client / server part for the declarative system manager I want to build on top of this is quite far out yet though. At least several months

[watermelon0]

IIRC the main reason here is that brew path is hardcoded during the build process of packages, which means that you wouldn't be able to use bottles.

I didn't check, but there is a chance that path is also hardcoded in (some) formulae, so even building from the source might not help here.

[scribu]

You could run the build process with chroot or inside Docker, so that the hardcoded paths actually resolve to a designated subdirectory.

[mananaysiempre]

Incidentally, that’s what is usually done in Nixpkgs in similar situations when there’s no better alternative, see buildFHSEnv et al.

[akdev1l]

In many cases the build output also has hardcoded paths unfortunately

so doing `brew install` inside a container with the proper volumes it’s not sufficient to fix the issue. Everything would have to run from within the container as well.

[amarshall]

Nix effectively has per-user packages, but it’s hard to read into your full use case from your comment.

[benwaffle]

oh, I guess this is why the nix installer creates 32 macOS users called _nixbld$N

[homebrewer]

It's explained in the documentation.

https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.25/installation/multi-user