I haven't looked at Homebrew since that got started. The philosophical difference at that time was using macports and having a consistent and managed */local/ collection of tools with self contained dependencies vs. adding new tools with dependencies tied to the current Mac OS release.
I still use MacPorts for that reason and it is easy enough to create a local portfile for whatever isn't in Macports.
I find this to be the easy way to manage networked development computers.
I used MacPorts a decade ago, but at some point realized that Homebrew had more packages that were kept consistently up-to-date. Switched and never looked back.
I switched away back to macports when homebrew decided to get rid of formula options. To be honest, I always find homebrew frustrating, it feels that they've often made technical decisions that are not necessarily the best but they've been much more successful at marketing themselves than macports.
oh, I actually hadn't realized that this is what they settled on in the end. ffmpeg is the quintessential package where options make sense so good that that's still supported.
The other issue I experienced with homebrew around that time were related to having different versions of openssl installed because I had some old codebase I had to run (and for performance reasons didn't want to use docker). But that's definitely a edge case.
I’m a full-time Mac and iOS developer, have been for almost 20 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it. Might just be my bubble, but I don’t think it’s a huge thing yet. (I’m going to check it out now!)
it's worth noting for Homebrew users that it also has a nice built-in module for managing a Homebrew installation by generating a Brewfile for you. So you can transition at your own pace, if you like
>Why is it funny? Homebrew is the de facto standard terminal packaging tool for macOS.
It's funny because a multi-trillion dollar company can't be bothered to release a native package manager or an official binary repository for their OS after decades of pleading from developers.
They released "App Store" for the average Joe. We can all agree it is not suitable for power users, but at the same time what would power users gain over existing solutions if they were to introduce something?
"Sherlocking" can be unfortunate for a developer, but it's odd to view it as an inherently bad thing. A package manager is a core OS feature, even Microsoft has WinGet now.
It has become a core OS feature. Historically, you see the set of core OS features expand tremendously. Back in the 80’s drawing lines and circles wasn’t even a core OS feature (not on many home computers, and certainly not on early PCs), bit-mapped fonts were third part add-ons for a while, vector-based fonts were an Adobe add-on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Type_Manager), printer drivers were third party, etc.
I think that’s natural. As lower layers become commodities (try making money selling an OS that only manages memory and processes), OS sellers have to add higher layer stuff to their products to make money on them.
As to Sherlocking, big companies cannot do well there in the eyes of “the angry internet”:
- don’t release feature F: “They don’t even support F out of the box. On the competitor’s product, you get that for free”
- release a minimal implementation: “They have F, but it doesn’t do F1, F2, or F3”
- release a fairly full implementation: “Sherlocking!” and/or nitpicking about their engineering choices.
Or even more terrible, open the image full screen with no way to close it until it feels it has been open long enough to close on its own. maybe show some sort of timer counting down, and then before dismissing itself, it opens the App Store listing for the app. it'll be very convenient for the user as no user interaction will be required for any of this
