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	by yrmt 4279 days ago
	It's slow and it has to build the packages most of the time. pkgin will install a precompiled packages very quickly. It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

4 comments

dekz 4279 days ago

> It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

And that's a problem?

I would argue that it's a feature. Due to Homebrew being written in Ruby, it has easily allowed over 4,000 contributors [1]. Recipes are easy to read and inspect for verification purposes.

What is the advantage of C over Ruby?

[1](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/graphs/contributors)

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neckro23 4279 days ago

Homebrew now has prepackaged binaries ("bottles") for most of the packages that take awhile to build, which has really helped the speed thing.

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tvon 4279 days ago

Yeah, but they often rely on the homebrew being installed to /usr/local which is just plain bad advice.

At least, not using /usr/local myself, I see a lot of packages building because they have detected I changed the base directory.

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evgen 4279 days ago

So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs is somehow better than a collection of scripts that lets you build from source? I don't think so... As an update is something that is done occasionally and in the background "slow" is not exactly a reason to change.

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snw 4279 days ago

actually the "src" in pkgsrc means that you have the choice of using binary packages (pkg) or building from source. The best of both worlds!

Give it a try, you might like it (because it rocks!)

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ics 4279 days ago

Homebrew does both as well for popular packages; 'bottles' are binary packages, with the option (--build-from-source) to build it yourself.

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vacri 4279 days ago

So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs...

Why use OSX, then? Shouldn't you be using Gentoo?

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