>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.
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.