Homebrew 2.0 is Here With Official Support For Linux and Windows (brew.sh)

Homebrew, a popular package manager for macOS, has released version 2.0 with official support for Linux and Windows 10 (with Windows Subsystem Linux). Cross-platform setup scripts just got a whole lot easier. Other highlights: Homebrew does not run on OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) and below. For 10.4 - 10.6 support, see Tigerbrew. This has allowed us to remove large amounts of legacy code.
Homebrew does not migrate old, pre-1.0.0 installations from the Homebrew/legacy-homebrew (formerly Homebrew/homebrew repository. This has allowed us to delete legacy code that dealt with migrations from old versions.
Homebrew does not have any formulae with options in Homebrew/homebrew-core. Options will still be supported and encouraged by third-party taps. This change allows us to better focus on delivering binary packages rather than options. Formulae with options had to be built from source, could not be tested on our CI system and provided a disproportionate support burden on our volunteer maintainers.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

No python, no likey

Re:Wow

[fbobraga]

good question...

Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[goombah99]

they should give it replaceble themed metaphor names for it's cute naming of steps
Instead of just, Cellar, and brewing, and ....

one could come up with more edgy or more cute names. Perhaps a Football theme, or BDSM theme or Cat lover theme.

Other than that does anything distinguish Homebrew?

it seems like every 5 years the distro that's the least broken and least hassle fluctuates

for a while it was Fink., then Macports, then back to Fink. THen back to mac ports. Then homebrew.

Over the last while homebrew has been pretty consistently good so I've not had to go back to one of the others.

Currently however, being heavily into python now, I use anaconda for everything Anaconda can supply and then only then reach for the homebrew.

What I like about some of these is that maintain their own diractory like /opt/sw or the brew directory , and don't poison your /usr tree. This makes trashing them and re-installing a bitrotted crufty install easy to fix. I also like that I can even do user level installs for some of these.

But my favorite by far is anaconda with its environments to keep the vegetables from touching on my plate. If someone could expand anaconda to gobble up all of homebrew this would be perfect.

Re:Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[goombah99]

some features I particularly like about anaconda are

1. it makes reversions much more simple and reliable. SO if you install something and later find you need to downgrade, it can walk back all the dendencies.

2. It does the best job of solving mutal dependencies i've seen. if you install one package that also installs say the latest version of Latex, then late install a package but it requires an older LAtex, it can find some combination of Latex and all it's dependencies that let you run all your installs even if it has to downgrade some. it's really robust and warns you about it's tricky schemes before it does them

3. However with the environments this situation actually arrises less than it used to. It used to be one had one giant monolithic apt-get set of libraries for every damn thing you did on your computer. Now with enviroments you install the least set of installs to do whatever you are doing. Say scientific pything. Maybe you don't need the GPU or Simd for some project well don't install those alpha-level libs needed for that. But when you do need that risk taking fragile class of dependencies well you can have that in enviroment. And both of those are separated from the ones you need for word processing and those are separated from the ones you need for Blender.

do all the fragilities go away. And if one of them does die you can just kill it. and re-install. And it's fast cause it's small and minimal to download.

4. finally it's easy to clone an particular environment. Combine this with minimal installs per environment and it makes knowing what the minimum set of dependcies you need to make your code work. Easy to distribute.

5. when I used to have to reinstall some monolithic apt-get environment accumulated from years of installs I would find that somethings could no longer be found in the same versions or had been deprecated. getting back to where you were, especially if you used non-standard repositories was hell.

Re: Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just pip install?

Re: Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[Anonymous Coward]

pip doesn't come remotely close to being a complete solution. Pip doesn't do as good a dependence resolution or roll back or envirnoment management as anaconda, certainly not as easily. And PIP is not a general purpose Distro installer.

Re: Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "a complete solution"? A lot of developers would like to know what that is.

You clearly have not used PIP, or my department is full of idiots that find it extremely difficult to do stuff in Anaconda (macOS). Installing Anaconda is like installing Debian (or any other distro) to use vim and Arch (or any other distro) to use neovim all in the same computer. A shotgun to kill a mosquito.

If your code needs older libraries to work and need witchery with the dependencies, well, update your code mate.

Re:Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[Anonymous Coward]

/usr/local/ in to the Linux world what /opt/ is for some other unices.

Re:Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[goombah99]

yes but if every package installed dumps into /usr/local it becomes the trash compacter on the death star. You don't want to wade in and clean it out.

Re:Hoping for new cute metaphor themes

[Anonymous Coward]

Nix runs on mac as well.

Thanks to APK

[Anonymous Coward]

His amazing hosts file engine has allowed me to blacklist homebrew and its repositories , keeping that filthy, cancerous open sores software off my beloved Windows 10 PC.

All hail Microsoft!

I’ve stayed away

[93 Escort Wagon]

I’m not sure their security model is fully baked. They claim sudo is bad; but their solution seems to be making /user/local/bin writable to everybody (and if you try to avoid this permissions change using sudo, homebrew will block it). And while they claim /user/local/bin is only the “preferred” install location, if you attempt to use a different directory you quickly find many basic things will break - so there’s no good way around this.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[phantomfive]

One of the many reasons I was glad to leave OSX was to be done with the lousy package management solutions. I am grateful for them, they were better than nothing, but there are so many better options on Linux.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[Anonymous Coward]

#! /bin/sh
# wrapper: dedicate homebrew to a single user only, run through sudo

brew=/usr/local/bin/brew
su=/usr/bin/su
brewadmin=brewadmin
if sudo true ; then
        cd /tmp; umask 022
        if [ ! -x ${brew} ] ; then
                installbrew=/tmp/install-brew
                curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install > "${installbrew}"
                chmod 755 "$installbrew"
                sudo ${su} ${brewadmin} -c /tmp/install-brew
        fi
        sudo ${su} ${brewadmin} ${brew} $@
fi

Re: I’ve stayed away

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not simply pip install?

Re:I’ve stayed away

[Anonymous Coward]

macports is based on BSD ports. ports is phenomenal, thus so is macports, even with their limitied support (limitied personel). Homebrew is trendy, but a binary installer, and it's momentum is from irrational popularity. The term "brewnistas" is appropriate. They remind me of the "penguinistas" from the early naughts, when linux was a mess (well, it still is) and too unstable and NOT ready for the prod servers, but the fanatics could not be tamed. Eventually, of course, linux got stable, but I can't see what is attractive about Homebrew. I think it's binary package management for individuals that want an easy way to install one thing, then they say how great it is their package management is managing one single binary package. I prefer to roll my own no matter how many packages I install.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[ruurd]

Simply untrue. Just checked. /usr/local/bin is not world or group writable.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[93 Escort Wagon]

Simply untrue. Just checked. /usr/local/bin is not world or group writable.

Then it is owned by you rather than root - correct? That’s slightly less awful but still not good.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[null etc.]

Homebrew's security model is half-baked, if that, and they justify it with lame rhetoric ("Why does Homebrew say sudo is bad? Sudo is dangerous, and you installed TextMate.app without sudo anyway.") Uhm, pointing out that TextMate installs itself poorly on an OS itself that has a half-baked approach to multi-user applications is... lazy at best, and incompetent at worst.

The best workaround I've found is to create a security group called something appropriate (like "local"), and assign your user to that group. Make all subdirectories of "/usr/local" owned by root and the security group, and make all subdirectories chmod 664, and all subdirectory files that are executable 775, and all other subdirectory files 664. Make any other users that want to use Homebrew also belong to the security group.

Occasionally, a "brew install" will fail, and you'll have to temporarily change all contents under "/usr/local" to be owned by your user, and then change it back after the install is done. But for the most part, this strategy allows multiple users to share Homebrew without exposing "/usr/local" to ridiculous security privileges.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[ceoyoyo]

Curious... maybe the newer versions of TextMate don't work properly? I certainly had to provide sudo credentials to install the TextMate command line tools in /usr/local/bin.

If they mean installing the app package itself, Homebrew could also choose to store it's stuff in a user writable location.

Re:I’ve stayed away

[Anonymous Coward]

And now in Linux-verse we get sexy package managements: snap, flatpak, appimage, etc. Yeah...!!

Anaconda is better if you just want Python shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Homebrew seems sketchy. The homebrew guy applied to Google and got rejected. So he may be able to cobble together homebrew but apparently his 10x whiteboard ninja skills weren't up to Google's standards. Maybe it turns he was only a 7.5x engineer and that's was not good enough for Google. Or maybe the homebrew guy just sucks. We will just never know. Either way, use conda.

Re:Anaconda is better if you just want Python shit

[Cito]

the real reason google didn't hire him is likely because he's a young white male.

Re:Anaconda is better if you just want Python shit

[Anonymous Coward]

you're upset about not being employed as a programmer with logic like this?

Ok :|

Lord of the Rings theme

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be precious.

Re:Lord of the Rings theme

[Anonymous Coward]

One does not simply walk into the latest version of a package!

Re:I've stayed away

[HiThere]

Yiii! Really? I'm impressed that something that bad is available. It sounds as if it should only be run in a VM, if then.

MacOS

[fluffernutter]

Brew is a hacked solution that was created because MacOS sucks. What is the point of bringing it to other OSes that already solved these problems a long time ago.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah bullshit.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it bullshit?

I think its pretty obvious that you are the one left smelling of shit here

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

And the package management solution on Windows is...?

Re:MacOS

[dmt0]

And the package management solution on Windows is...?

Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/)
Not saying it's great or better than what's on Linux, but it's definitely better than nothing.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Cygwin, lol

Re:MacOS

[serviscope_minor]

Yeah came here to say that.

I've found homebrew to be, well, it's better than macports, but that's not saying much. And macports was better than nothing, so homebrew is at least twice as good as nothing! On the other hand it somehow seems less good than what's available on Linux. The compile from source model is also just a bit on the annoyingly slow side. Kind of like gentoo, but with less of the funroll overtones.

Might bo OK on Windows though, that doesn't have well established package managers like Linux.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Lately I've been seeing MSYS2 the most.

Re:MacOS

[ruurd]

Blaaaah blaaaah blaaaah just hijack the thread for your uninformed and meritless opinions.

Re:MacOS

[guruevi]

Chocolatey is highly reliant on .NET and PowerShell (v4). It doesn't work on XP and is all around lousy on Windows Vista, 7 and 8. 10 is workable but it requires you trusting someone else to package/publish binaries, it also requires you to 'trust' the environment and will often break whenever your Windows environment isn't what the packager has assumed.

Although this seems to be normal to accept from deployment scenarios within the Windows ecosystem (such as SCCM and other commercial offerings), Brew (can) compile your binaries from scratch so you can relatively simple verify that what you get is what you want and hasn't been tampered with and should accept most of whatever your environment defaults are.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Solved the problem how, by bundling all third party software with the OS? Sorry, that git is too old, and you are off to github to compile it with dependencies yourself, package it on your own or repeat n times for everything you manage. Oh then I need that same git release on Some Other OS. Cygwin is is not cross platform, if you meant Windows.

RHEL8 is getting Streams, but that isn’t even released yet, and again, single platform.

Software distribution via your OS is stupid and outdated, the base OS needs to GTFO and stay away from the user land so we can have multiple versions of things installed in parallel, the latest versions, without all the technical debt involved with go to github and download everything .tar.gz

We really do need something like cross platform Cygwin with stable and latest branches. Maybe Brew brings us a step towards that. I can tell you have never had the fun of software developers asking for something like the latest python runtime, with x, y, z modules that link to native code, on all the windows/Ubuntu dev laptops, and inevitably all the RHEL/Ubuntu/whatever test environments, and production, oh and that BI or front end team that is all Macs too.

Open Source is SUPPOSED to be cross platform!!!!

Re: MacOS

[spongman]

Chocolatey for win32 apps, apt for Ubuntu/wsl.

Re: MacOS

[spongman]

Works great for me.

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

msys2 is just Arch Linux (pacman).

Re:MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

And the package management solution on Windows is...?

Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/)

Not saying it's great or better than what's on Linux, but it's definitely better than nothing.

I've used it. It sucks.

The correct answer is "A Linux package manager on WSL".

Re:MacOS

[AmiMoJo]

What is a good solution for Windows?

Chocolatey seems to be the most popular, but it's support for portable apps is quite poor.

Homebrew driving you to drink?

[wispoftow]

This project got momentum by trashing on MacPorts, although MacPorts has always worked fine for me. Homebrew will never be on my system, simply because of their shabby treatment of a good port system written by very good people.

(And for some silly reason, they decided to put everything in /usr/local, thereby making it very difficult to remove as it is commingled with other apps which use the same scheme.)

Re:Homebrew driving you to drink?

[PhunkySchtuff]

This project got momentum by trashing on MacPorts, although MacPorts has always worked fine for me. Homebrew will never be on my system, simply because of their shabby treatment of a good port system written by very good people.

Not only is this poor form to trash the competition - I don't know that the competition even deserve this trashing. I've been using MacPorts since it was DarwinPorts. I've never experienced it not working, or doing anything that I didn't expect it to. In the early days there may have been some software that simply wasn't ported over, but it's always behaved itself when I've been using it.

Re:Homebrew driving you to drink?

[nawcom]

I've preferred MacPorts/DarwinPorts because it's very similar to BSD Ports in regards to it using libraries separate from the base install, unlike the way homebrew works in regards to a number of libraries. Also MacPorts has gone a long way when it comes to having precompiled packages ready. I remember the 10.6 days and how much you compiled but now - 95% (my personal estimate) of the dependencies and target ports you're trying to install has precompiled packages for your specific Darwin version ready to go. Many times there's no compiling involved at all.

Re:Homebrew driving you to drink?

[Anonymous Coward]

This project got momentum by trashing on MacPorts, although MacPorts has always worked fine for me. Homebrew will never be on my system, simply because of their shabby treatment of a good port system written by very good people.

What were the claims they made that you object to?

Re:Homebrew driving you to drink?

[serviscope_minor]

This project got momentum by trashing on MacPorts, although MacPorts has always worked fine for me.

I never had luck with macports. I found it would work for a few months, then screw up and need a reinstall. Since it was compile from source that was an overnighter.

Technically I found it flawed. I didn't catch any drama regarding it but there's not really an excuse for that.

And for some silly reason, they decided to put everything in /usr/local

yep.

Which distro does this target?

[Bradmont]

What Linux distro does this target? The only one without an existing (and better) package management system is Slackware... and it's that way because the users want it that way...

Re:Which distro does this target?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Linux distro does this target? The only one without an existing (and better) package management system is Slackware... and it's that way because the users want it that way...

Difference is with Slackware the user must learn how to manage and set software execution permissions carefully. Not that Slackware is hard to use it just means that you must learn about path configuration right from the start!

With Slackware if you learn to compile and configure dependency paths so that binaries can run from within any /home/*user account instead of spattering shit in /usr and /usr/local and spend the time to package shit yourself then keeping an install clean becomes second nature. By and large that is why Slackware can run circles around other distros that spatter shit everywhere and are prone to breaking binaries because of simple path configuration issues. Nothing pisses me off more than distro's moving shit around and breaking paths for the sake of moving shit around. This is the reason why some so called "Linux experts" really piss off a great many people.

Re:Which distro does this target?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware with SlackBuilds.org and Sbopkg is already better thanks

Re:Which distro does this target?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Linux distro does this target? The only one without an existing (and better) package management system is Slackware... and it's that way because the users want it that way...

Difference is with Slackware the user must learn how to manage and set software execution permissions carefully. Not that Slackware is hard to use it just means that you must learn about path configuration right from the start!

With Slackware if you learn to compile and configure dependency paths so that binaries can run from within any /home/*user account instead of spattering shit in /usr and /usr/local and spend the time to package shit yourself then keeping an install clean becomes second nature. By and large that is why Slackware can run circles around other distros that spatter shit everywhere and are prone to breaking binaries because of simple path configuration issues. Nothing pisses me off more than distro's moving shit around and breaking paths for the sake of moving shit around. This is the reason why some so called "Linux experts" really piss off a great many people.

Holy fuck. Slackware users are still out there and defending its lack of proper packages.
Dude, I quit using Slackware in about 2000 or so, and you should have too.

Re:Which distro does this target?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Linux distro does this target? The only one without an existing (and better) package management system is Slackware... and it's that way because the users want it that way...

I don’t think anyone really wants a package management system intertwined with their OS.
They want the OS and software it _requires_, to be stable, and they want they latest version of everything else, or multiple versions sometimes. This doesn’t jive with existing Linux package management systems.

For example, if the system needs curl, then tuck an old version under /bin or something, but userland curl should be up to date always.

Re:Which distro does this target?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you get 2+ versions of curl in your system. What do you do when a bug/CVE is found? Will you go through your OS hunting for all the versions to update?
Reuse same example with openssl, and other critical libraries.

This is the point of Package Managers: they update your software, without breaking it.
This is why I hate docker/flatpack and everything that trails along with its own userspace: the library versions become unmanageable.

Malkovich?

[Anonymous Coward]

Malkovich. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich...

Nobody cares about Homebrew on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Homebrew on Linux? Yay! :P Wrong Audience.

Also, I've been a fan of Macports more than Homebrew.

Of course

[OneHundredAndTen]

Because there is a serious dearth of package infrastructures under Linux. While you are at it, come up with a new terminal emulator as well.

Used for years on Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

And now this looks like a mechanism to deploy portable tools basically everywhere. If it works as well as it does on OS X for Linux and windows, I’m all over that.

As well = isolated from the rest of the system and portable. It mentions installs into your home directory on Linux, and that’s exactly what I need. Let’s see if it works...

Re: Anaconda is better if you just want Python shi

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You suck at being a person.

Happy fun ball

[Tailhook]

Homebrew does not speak or respond to voice commands.
Homebrew does not have configuration with selections in alpha-qanon distributions
Homebrew does not have a cape or exhibit any special powers.
Homebrew does not have any selection to induce Hypo-package virtualization symmetry.
Homebrew does not require refrigeration.
Homebrew does not taste particularly good and should not be eaten.
Homebrew does not emit harmful rays or other quanta with this release and shielding is no longer necessary.
Homebrew does not tolerate taunting or being dropped.

Re:Happy fun ball

[Anonymous Coward]

Homebrew does not have wireless.
Homebrew has less space than a Nomad.
Lame.

Curious WHY You'd block them... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Curious WHY You'd block them & what hostnames were those (I'll check 'em against my own hosts file built up from others lists & security articles) - only reason I'd block 'em is IF they were known to serve up exploits of anykind.

APK

P.S.=> Of course, @ this point, I think you're just being sarcastic/facetious actually, but I am TRULY curious per my questions above (Now, I've got to get back to 200k NEW entries & a custom program (pure stringwork, no damn regex bullshit in them, just post/strpos etc.) to "shear away crap" off the hostnames in front & behind (comments & paths / to actual .html or script on them hosts don't need) for my hosts file from TONS blocked this past week)... apk

#t2sde can theoreically do this for a decade, too

[ReneR]

Always when I read "major news" like this I feel a bit sad not having polished and pusedh this more in our T2 SDE Linux cross compile emebdded scripting source meta distribution thing: https://t2sde.org/ I compiled to macOS a decade ago to "emerge" Subversion from source and such, 2005/2006 time frame. I even used it to compile some MinGW runtime thing, to cross compile some of my code and test programs to Windows executables. Guess now w/ my new YouTube ad funded effort I could polish this more up again for just build more again – https://youtube.com/ReneRebe

creimer's asshole is quivering at the thoughf! Unf

[Anonymous Coward]

Faggots with AIDS. Aka Mac users.

Package manager?

[Red_Forman]

I thought installing applications on a Mac was simply "copy the directory and your software is installed". Why the fuck would you need a package manager on Mac?

Homebrew is nice, but Cask is even nicer

[cerberusss]

Homebrew was already a very nice way to install GNU and other open source stuff. But Cask is an extension that scripts the installation of packaged software:
https://caskroom.io/

Plus, if you install the mas command-line utility to install App Store stuff, this makes it easy to completely script the installation of a Mac. The following shell script installs a fresh new Mac for me:

#!/bin/sh
export HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS="--appdir=/Applications"

# install homebrew
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent....)"
brew doctor
brew tap caskroom/cask
brew install \
imagemagick \
watch \
par2 \
wget \
ffmpeg \
youtube-dl \
vim

# some apps
brew cask install \
firefox \
istat-menus \
google-chrome \
iterm2 \
hammerspoon

mas install 123456 # Break Reminder (2.3.0)
mas install 234567 # The Unarchiver (4.0.0)
mas install 345678 # 1Password (6.8.8)

Note that for mas to work, you'll have to log into the App Store first, then kick off the above script.

Code of Conduct

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for an article on Homebrew's new CoC.

*Returns to bunker with popcorn*

No thanks I've already got one.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very nice.

Real Working Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Burn a Linux ISO to a USB drive
2) Insert the working USB drive into a MAC
3) Turn on the MAC while holding the Option key
4) Select the USB drive from the menu
5) Boot to Linux
6) Install Linux, wiping osX off of the entire machine
7) Happy Linux machine

This works well with Mint 18 64 bit Mate.

Highlights: Here's Stuff We Don't Do

[W. Justice Black]

Lots of "homebrew does not..." in those highlights, no?