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

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.

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

[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.

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]

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.

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.

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...