alt.hn

4/22/2025 at 6:39:20 PM

Sapphire: Rust based package manager for macOS

 https://github.com/alexykn/sapphire

by adamnemecek

4/22/2025 at 7:18:18 PM

Hey, so I built this thing, most of it at so far at least. And yeah, right now it isn't doing many things better than Homebrew.

Setting of relative paths for bottle installs is still not perfect, well it works for every bottle I have tested except rust. Getting bottles working 100% is very doable though imo.

Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json API lacks information there and a full on Ruby -> Rust transpiler is way out of scope. Will probably settle for automatic build system detection based on archive structure there. + Maybe do my own version of the .rb scripts but in a more general machine readable format, not .rs lol

Casks seem to work but I have only tested some .dmg -> .app ones and .pkg installers so far though. As with bottles 100% doable.

Given that almost all formulae are available as bottles for modern ARM mac this could become a fully featured package manager. Actually didn't think so many people would look at it, started building it for myself because Homebrew just isn't cutting it for what I want.

Started working on a declarative package + system manager for mac because I feel ansible is overkill for one machine and not really made for that and nix-darwin worms itself into the system so deep. Wrapping Brew commands was abysmally slow though so I started working on this and by now I am deep enough in I won't stop xD

Anyway I am grateful for every bug report, Issue and well meaning pull request.

by alexykn

4/23/2025 at 2:32:24 AM

This is awesome!

Is there uv support?[0]

One of my biggest gripes about brew is how they manage dependencies. The devs have a conflicting philosophy that creates bloat. Package maintainers must define settings, settings should always use the latest Python version. It makes no sense. Maintainers won't update unless things break so you got a bunch of Python versions running around. And it won't use system Python!

Uv seems to provide an elegant solution for this. You can build a venv for each package and rust version will only have the specified deps. Since uv finds all your Python instances (and packages) and soft links them you have way less bloat and venvs become really useful. You can also use run and other tools to handle executables

Plus is also rust so good synergy ;)

[0] https://astral.sh/blog/uv

by godelski

4/23/2025 at 5:17:34 AM

You should only be using Homebrew for installing software that happens to be written in Python, not dependencies for your own Python projects. If you do that, the Python version does not matter, it's just whatever version is required to make the package work.

by Kwpolska

4/23/2025 at 9:28:03 AM 

  > not dependencies for your own Python projects
I'm not doing that. Honestly I'm not sure how to do that and it sounds like a real pain.

  > the Python version does not matter
This is incorrect. Go check what versions of Python brew has installed for you. It's definitely not your system version...

It's not "what works" it is "what the maintainer specified". And according to the brew devs this is supposed to be /the latest version that works/. Which was my point. People don't update just on a Python change. That's not going to happen without automation. (I even suggested we be allowed to specify the minimum version and I was told it's maintainer's responsibilities). You can trivially find packages that can be used with newer versions of Python than their brew formulas specify.

by godelski

4/23/2025 at 2:00:55 PM

I don't follow the argument here:

* One of the main reasons Homebrew doesn't use the "system" Python is because Apple has repeatedly indicated that they want to remove it, and that integrators should not depend on it. This, plus per-package Python version requirements makes using a single system Python a non-starter.

* The "bloat" you're noting in Homebrew around multiple Python interpreters is present in `uv` and `pyenv` as well: `uv` handles multiple interpreters transparently, so you may not even realize how many you have installed. I think this is a good pattern: disk space is cheap relative to the timesink of connecting the right Python version to the right set of packages, which is why every distribution scheme (including both Homebrew and Debian) prefers to distribute multiple Python versions.

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 6:15:38 PM 

  > because Apple has repeatedly indicated that they want to remove it
That's not a reason to not use it. There's absolutely zero reason for me to have two copies of an exact same Python version (e.g 3.11.4). There is rarely reason to have a differing subversions (3.11.3 vs 3.11.4).

  > is present in `uv`
Are you guessing or do you know? Try it out. Prove me wrong.

I said they search for versions on your system and link if found. Seriously, look into it

  > disk space is cheap
That's not correct. It's a thing you need to consider when you have to compromise but not an infinite resource. But there's something cheaper than storage: infrequently scanning the system!

The problem is when everyone thinks this way then space is no longer cheap (especially with Apple!)

Tragedy of the commons

In fact it's a big reason I live in the terminal. Because even on a modern M2 air that bloat creeps in. My system is fast and snappy. I have plenty of storage. But this isn't true if I didn't. The creep still happens in these programs but their nature lessens the blows and the likelihood that people care about these things increases.

by godelski

4/26/2025 at 12:43:41 AM

Why should brew handle 3.11.3 differently from 3.11.4, just because you have another copy of it on your computer? What if apple patches it or updates the version suddenly?

That kind of magical special case behavior is not intuitive and creates more problems than it is worth.

by ycombinatrix

4/23/2025 at 7:07:03 PM

> That's not a reason to not use it.

It is, in fact, an excellent reason not to use it. Homebrew runs on tens of millions of machines; we are absolutely not going to rely on things that we're told not to rely on unless absolutely necessary. Python is readily buildable and we already need to build multiple versions for reasons aforementioned, so this condition does not apply.

Also note, it's stronger than what I originally said: 10.15 doesn't ship with Python by default at all anymore. I only have it installed (at 3.9.6) because I also have XCode installed. Homebrew supports being used without XCode or the CLT, so that alone would be a hard blocker for system Python for us.

> Are you guessing or do you know? Try it out. Prove me wrong.

My `uv python list` shows that I have 3 uv-managed versions of Python installed, along with 5 pyenv versions and 2 Homebrew versions. I have more than most people because I test large matrices of Python versions at once, but I imagine a normal Python developer isn't too far off.

You can test this for yourself with the same command. If you're developing more than one Python library or application at a time, I strongly suspect `uv` or `pyenv` is using more space for Python versions than Homebrew is.

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 10:50:15 PM 

  > an excellent reason not to use it
You're really missing my argument here.

  >> there's something cheaper than storage: infrequently scanning the system!
The solution already exists

  If required python version does not exist, download.
This is already being done. The missing part is the scanning of the system. I need to make this abundantly clear: You do not need to rely on Apple for this to be a solution. Furthermore, even if Apple completely removes python, making this change would still improve brew and reduce bloat. This is why I didn't care about that comment. Because it is inconsequential to what I'm suggesting. If they remove python you're in the exact same position as not having the right version of python. It is equivalent. I'm not sure why you're harping on this.

  > My `uv python list` shows
You're again missing the point. It isn't about having different versions, hell I got 3.13, 3.12, 3.11, 3.10, 3.9, and 3.8 on my system. The problem is having redundant copies of the minor (or even patch) versions. When I installed `uv` I uninstalled brew, purged everything, and reinstalled. This is because when I'm creating a new venv it isn't actually `uv` that is installing a new python version, it is linking one that was installed by brew. When I was using Anaconda, conda didn't search for existing versions (and packages), it just installed its own. You might be thinking this isn't a problem with brew and a problem with conda, but that's passing the buck. Brew is making the same error that conda was and thinking brew is better and that the solution should be fixed by others is just idiotic. Its blaming those downstream for a problem that's being created. If a "crime" is a "crime" then it doesn't matter who does it.

We're getting off topic now, since this is besides the point. But hey, here's a few things that can help look at the system and what's happening.

On my system, brew installed 3.13, 3.12, and 3.11 (you can guess when I purged). For good measure, try this instead

  brew list | xargs -P8 -n1 sh -c 'brew cat "${0}" | grep "depends_on \"python@3." | sed -e "s/.*\(python@3\.[0-9]*\).*/\1/g"' 2> /dev/null | sort -u
This will go through all your brew packages and find the python depends. My output shows 3.11 and 3.12. Interestingly, no python 3.13, though brew installed this. Interesting considering brew and brew-core don't have python code (according to github). Maybe something installed it and then I removed it. I'm unsure. But let's edit our command and check only those python@3.11 instances.

  brew list | xargs -P8 -n1 sh -c 'brew cat "${0}" | grep "depends_on \"python@3.11" &> /dev/null && echo "${0}"' 2> /dev/null
I checked the formulas on github, none of those even have python 3.11 anymore. These are cryptography, libxml2, numpy, py3parser, py3cairo, python-cryptography, pygobjects3, and python-packaging. With the exception of python-cryptography and python-packaging (no GitHub formula), the brew formula on GitHub depends on both 3.12 and 3.13 for every one of these. There is no dep for 3.11! Did a `brew update` and `brew upgrade` and they're still 3.11. But hey, now the first brew list command reports 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13. Doing `brew info python-cryptography` there's a green checkmark on `python@3.12` and `python@3.13` (`python@3.11` is not shown), while `python-setuptools` has a red x despite the fact that I have setuptools installed in both 3.13 and 3.12 in different uv environments (it also isn't finding rust). So it certainly isn't finding packages and trying to reduce redundancy which is the big problem `uv` tries to solve in the first place.

by godelski

4/23/2025 at 11:38:39 AM

My experience was actually the opposite -- a package I used broke because somebody did an automated "bump the python version this package uses" change without noticing that upstream for the package hadn't yet made a release with the necessary changes to make it work with that python version, so it fell over on startup. (They were quick with reverting it when I reported the problem.)

by pm215

4/23/2025 at 5:22:26 PM

That happens too. But that's normal bugs.

For the issue I'm talking about you have to look. It's a non breaking bug. So unless you look you likely won't see the problem.

That's two types of bugs: 1) Those that scream at you 2) Those that hide. We're talking about by later

by godelski

4/23/2025 at 7:44:36 AM

https://mise.jdx.dev/ supports uv through its pipx backend, and is a very good package/tool manager in general.

by saint_yossarian

4/23/2025 at 9:28:40 AM

Thanks! I'll check it out!

by godelski

4/23/2025 at 6:30:29 PM

love uv <3 I will look into integrating that. Have not decided if and how to implement my own packaging / source build dsl though and will probably open a git poll for that the coming days

by alexykn

4/23/2025 at 7:01:01 PM

Awesome! I look forward to see how this progresses! It'll be nice to have a package manager that supports true multithreading and is just overall a lot faster. There's a lot of things that are needed that brew simply just can't do.

I haven't played around with this yet (will this weekend!) but I know brew is way too verbose and IO is a big slowdown. Probably doesn't matter because it is written in ruby. But it's an easy thing to miss and is quite common for people to not recognize this. Like when people use `tar xvf` instead of `tar xf`, there's a very noticeable speed difference for many packages lol. (Sorry if I'm preaching to the choir here. It's a pet peeve of mine given how common this is)

by godelski

4/22/2025 at 10:39:22 PM

You mentioned a declarative package manager for Mac. I've really liked using Homebrew Bundle [1] over the last couple years. It's about the level of declarative that I've wanted and has made it really easy to bootstrap new laptop or VM (since it also works on Linux). The format for a Brewfile was pretty easy to figure out.

The way I ended up using it was that `brew install` would temporarily install something, without adding it to my Brewfile. And a little `brew add` wrapper would add the package to my Brewfile to keep it on the system permanently. That part with the wrapper could have used some love and would be a nice fit for a new brew-compatible frontend IMO. Maybe you could expand on that for Sapphire, if that also scratches your declarative itch?

[1] https://docs.brew.sh/Brew-Bundle-and-Brewfile

by samhclark

4/23/2025 at 9:27:37 AM

That would be fantastic. My bootstrap scripts already use bundle but it’s easy to fall into config drift.

by JimDabell

4/22/2025 at 7:20:02 PM

What makes you interested in a rust implementation of brew?

I'm guessing it's that you hoping that it is eventually more performant -- are there specific areas of current brew you have identified as performance bottlenecks likely to eventually benefit from a rust implementation?

Or any more info to share about assumptions/hopes that motivated this or any other motivations?

by jrochkind1

4/22/2025 at 7:48:48 PM

Building from source, obviously, will never be really that much more performant as it mainly relies on the underlying build systems and things like ninja, cmake, cargo etc. are usually optimized very very well.

Thanks to rust just being (slightly, significantly? no idea about ruby's speed) faster + concurrent downloading & pouring of bottles, most "regular" formula installs feel a good bit faster than brew already. Mainly noticeable when installing multiple formulae at once.

Casks, especially those with pkg installers, seem to profit a bit less here.

Performance was a reason, not the main one though, like I said I wanted and still want, to build a declarative package + system managing solution on top. The idea was to get into rust with that. Imo having the base written in the same language instead of wrapping commands also gives more flexibility there.

Another reason is that I never liked the way brew looks and feels. Right now the ui/ux for Sapphire is far from finished, more like a clusterf*k and only the search command really looks the way I want it. Aiming for something modern, clean and information rich without beeing overly verbose. I really like dnf5 and what AerynOS is doing and will probably take some inspiration there.

Like mentioned, Bottles and Casks should be 100% doable and that would cover most package needs on macOS, I do not see why I should also define a new repo and packaging ecosystem when such a big and popular one exists.

Source build capability will probably stay(for easy integration of source building in the system management part later) but not be focused on brew formulae as the ruby dsl would be a horror to parse.

Well and sh*t I am not trying to compete really. This is the first time building something with rust and I really really had no idea what a giant never ending rabbit hole macOS package management is and how massive and complex Brew is.

This went from should I to can I pretty quick for me xD

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:32:42 PM

I would be interested to see more declarative package managers for macOS, I was looking for something similar just a few days ago.

by mudkipdev

4/22/2025 at 7:38:45 PM

I say this from ignorance, but coming from a lineage of linux package managers; brew must be doing something wrong - and upon immediate introspection I doubt that its language specific.

The performance of apt/dnf in comparison is surreal; but dnf (or at least yum, its predecessor) is written in Python; which has even worse performance characteristics than Ruby.

Clearly something is wrong, I wonder how different they are architecturally.

by dijit

4/22/2025 at 7:42:20 PM

Have you tried Homebrew in the last year or so? I think a lot of people have an impression of Homebrew's performance from the "bad old days," i.e. back when Homebrew had to evaluate every single local formula file to perform any operations at all.

(There's still low handing fruit, but it's not like it was a few years ago where `brew list` took seconds to run. It now runs nearly instantaneously for me locally, like most of the other happy path commands.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 9:03:55 PM

Yes, I use it on my daily driver, and it's at least two-orders of magnitude slower than apt.

However, the speed increase coincided with my upgrade to an M-Series laptop, so it's possible I just presumed there was a significant hardware speedup in the time we're talking about.

by dijit

4/23/2025 at 3:41:33 PM

Yes, I have. It's slow as shit even on an M1. In the time it takes to install one brew package on an M1, a sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade has finished updating a dozen packages on a ten year old intel system with a SATA SSD.

I fucking hate homebrew.

I hate the fact that the project still has the attitude of "sudo is le hard and we are le tired."

The project people are assholes.

The maintainers are often well behind current releases.

It maintains a cache of every installed version for no good reason wasting ~10GB or more of my SSD space.

When it breaks it's impenetrable trying to figure out how it broke, there's nobody to ask for help, the documentation sucks, and the fastest thing is just to wipe the whole fucking directory and start over.

I could go on. I don't know a single person that likes using homebrew - it's just the package manager everyone resigned themselves to use.

by KennyBlanken

4/23/2025 at 4:00:58 PM

> I fucking hate homebrew.

> I hate the fact that the project still has the attitude of "sudo is le hard and we are le tired."

> The project people are assholes.

Have you considered that approaching us like this isn't productive and doesn't make anyone remotely interested in helping you?

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 9:50:55 PM

I'm not the person you responded to, but I've mostly just accepted that homebrew is another paper cut that you get from using a Mac. If I post publicly about it I'm usually not looking for help.

Years ago I worked with someone who strongly disliked brew because it leaned far too heavily on magic. I was okay with it because it seemed to work well. Brew still uses magic but now it just seems like I'm fighting it every single step of the way. I am le tired.

by inferiorhuman

4/23/2025 at 10:39:26 PM

As a serious question, with no leading implied: what are you fighting about Homebrew? I can say with 100% earnestness that we're interested in improving the user experience, and we want to know where the pain points are for our users.

Actually hearing about them (instead of just cursing at us) is genuinely helpful, and we genuinely appreciate it.

by woodruffw

4/24/2025 at 7:42:07 AM

> It maintains a cache of every installed version for no good reason wasting ~10GB or more of my SSD space.

cmon, `brew cleanup --prune=0` is just part of the muscle memory by now.

by fnord123

4/22/2025 at 11:30:06 PM

Another performance characteristic that used to piss me off when I used brew was that at least for one program, it had to invoke brew to launch. Something about finding a path. So that's an entire ruby interpreter starting and stopping just to (in this case) run a bash script. Horribly slow.

by WD-42

4/23/2025 at 2:06:56 AM

That’s been fixed for at least a year! But yes, that used to be very slow, particularly when loading brew also meant loading every formula.

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 9:32:55 PM

One big difference is that apt and dnf are both binary package management systems, whereas Homebrew is a source-based build system with binary packages (“bottles”) added on top.

by amarshall

4/23/2025 at 5:55:05 PM

FWIW, I believe DNF (as of 5?) is now written in C++.

But as a long time Linux user who always has to use a Mac at work I've been consistently floored by how painful Homebrew is to use, to the point that for my latest corp-issued MacBook I switched to home-manager and I'm not looking back.

by bobthecowboy

4/24/2025 at 7:39:14 AM

`brew search python` takes 3 seconds from a cold start.

by fnord123

4/22/2025 at 11:33:03 PM

Just FYI you are describing a ports system, of which there are many. From macports, to alpine packages, to nixpkgs... Tons of research and automation in this area already. Would encourage looking at Nix and distri in particular. Many Nix packages can be built on/for macOS!

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#preface

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/tags/distri/

by NewJazz

4/23/2025 at 7:31:38 PM

I know nix, did use nix-darwin for a while and actually integrated my own scripts called from the flake into setting up my system xD

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:46:14 PM

Cool project, good luck with it!

If I may surface one use case: Several years ago I had to manage a bunch of Macs for CI jobs. The build process (Unreal's UAT) didn't support running more than one build process at a time, and Docker was really slow, so I'd hoped to use different user accounts to bypass that and get some parallelization gains. Homebrew made that very difficult with its penchant for system-wide installs. So a feature request: I'd love to see a competitive package manager that limits itself to operating somewhere (overridable) in the user's home directory.

by Scramblejams

4/22/2025 at 9:39:48 PM

IIRC the main reason here is that brew path is hardcoded during the build process of packages, which means that you wouldn't be able to use bottles.

I didn't check, but there is a chance that path is also hardcoded in (some) formulae, so even building from the source might not help here.

by watermelon0

4/22/2025 at 10:29:41 PM

You could run the build process with chroot or inside Docker, so that the hardcoded paths actually resolve to a designated subdirectory.

by scribu

4/22/2025 at 10:35:28 PM

Incidentally, that’s what is usually done in Nixpkgs in similar situations when there’s no better alternative, see buildFHSEnv et al.

by mananaysiempre

4/23/2025 at 1:46:55 AM

In many cases the build output also has hardcoded paths unfortunately

so doing `brew install` inside a container with the proper volumes it’s not sufficient to fix the issue. Everything would have to run from within the container as well.

by akdev1l

4/22/2025 at 8:49:36 PM

Initial idea for this really came from my dayjob too, we have macs but no way to centrally manage them. The client / server part for the declarative system manager I want to build on top of this is quite far out yet though. At least several months

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 9:28:16 PM

Nix effectively has per-user packages, but it’s hard to read into your full use case from your comment.

by amarshall

4/22/2025 at 8:39:20 PM

One thing that Homebrew does not do easily is to easily allow for creation of universal libraries and binaries - https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/4647

Maybe that could be a place where sapphire differentiates?

by yincrash

4/22/2025 at 10:29:46 PM

> probably settle for automatic build system detection based on archive structure there

Please add knobs for the end user to manually configure this per package and global default before adding autodetection. As a user to is very frustrating to have to patch the package manager to override some well-intentioned automagic which didn't consider my setup or dig through sources to uncover some undocumented assumption. yarn is a cautionary example.

by 3np

4/22/2025 at 10:50:46 PM

I'll add manual override flags and also let users not only build from source from formulae but any dir on their machine they want, only makes sense

by alexykn

4/23/2025 at 5:13:29 PM

> Build from source formulae is still pretty f*ed + I do not know if it is really feasible given that the json API lacks information there and a full on Ruby -> Rust transpiler is way out of scope. Will probably settle for automatic build system detection based on archive structure there. + Maybe do my own version of the .rb scripts but in a more general machine readable format, not .rs lol

Last I checked (which was about a year ago), Homebrew had ~7000 formulas (not including casks).

I think it would be feasible to transcribe most of them to your format of choice with AI, run the build in a loop and ask the LLM to fix errors, and reserve manual intervention for the few cases that the LLM can't fix.

by miki123211

4/23/2025 at 6:25:51 PM

Yeah, this would 100% be feasible. Great idea. It's during the week now so I don't have much time besides work.

I'll probably open a Poll on git within the next couple days about what to do about a real from source packaging system with it's own dsl, maybe just yaml/toml or something a bit more powerful like lua with mlua. No matter the choice of packaging apporach I would like to keep the generated packages "bottle compliant" -> at least with the json api spec, since this also installs from there.

There seems to be at least some in my project so even though I am very opinionated on a lot of things I don't think I should decide on that completely alone, especially given that this is the first time I play with packaging.

by alexykn

4/23/2025 at 6:26:10 PM

on github xD

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:25:34 PM

Perhaps you could embed something like https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke to run the Ruby scripts for compatibility.

by nicoburns

4/22/2025 at 8:29:35 PM

Looked at that. I do not really think implementing something like artichoke or rutie would be a good idea. I do not want my project to become overly bloated and to achieve my real goal of a declarative system management thing I think sticking to bottles (that cover almost all formulae thanks to the amazing homebrew community) and casks, getting those to work 100% is the better approach. Thank you for the suggestion though!

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:26:10 PM

Please don't.

by adamnemecek

4/23/2025 at 3:57:11 PM

Can you just shell out to homebrew for unsupported cases? I don’t imagine the overhead of ruby will be that high compared to compiling the code.

by AlphaSite

4/23/2025 at 2:22:14 AM

Does the "casks" and "bottles" language imply that it's intended be compatible with Homebrew? That isn't made explicit in the description.

by stevage

4/23/2025 at 12:13:52 PM

Yes, this is only a replacement for the Homebrew CLI. It doesn’t have its own package repository and moreover it doesn’t have the ability to build packages (yet)—it’s just downloading and installing the binaries built by Homebrew.

by MatthiasPortzel

4/22/2025 at 11:49:13 PM

Good luck. Homebrew hasn't cut it since they started disallowing custom compile flags, and making the user jump through hoops if they want anything slightly different.

by internet2000

4/22/2025 at 7:37:47 PM

With my Homebrew hat on, but not speaking for others: I think this is pretty cool, and demonstrates something that we've discussed indirectly for years.

At its core, there are really two parts to Homebrew:

1. There's the client side, i.e. `brew`, which 99.9% of users stick to happy paths (bottle installs, supported platforms) within. These users could be supported with relative ease by a small native-code installer, since the majority of the work done by the installer in the happy path is fetching bottles, exploding them, and doing a bit of relocation.

2. There's literally everything else, i.e. all of the developer, repository, and CI/CD machinery that keeps homebrew-core humming. This is the largely invisible infrastructure that makes `brew install` work smoothly, and it's very hard to RIIR (in a large part because it's tied heavily to the formula DSL, which is arbitrary Ruby).

(1) is a nice experimental space, because Homebrew does (IMO) a decent job of isolating the client-facing side from the complexity of (2). However, (2) is where the meat-and-potatoes of packaging happens, and where Homebrew's differentiators really lie (specifically, in how easy it is to contribute new packages and bump existing ones).

Edit: Another noteworthy aspect here around performance: I mentioned this in another comment[1], but parallel downloads of things like bottles and DMGs is not an architectural limitation of Homebrew itself, but instead a conscious decision to trade some install speed for courtesy towards the services we fetch from (including GitHub itself). Smaller projects can sidestep this because they're not directing nearly the same degree of volume; I think this project will discover if/when its volumes grow that it will need to serialize downloads to avoid being throttled or outright limited.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765605

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 9:12:44 PM

> "it's very hard to RIIR"

RIIR - "Rewrite It In Rust" (maybe obvious in context? sharing in case not)

by chrisweekly

4/23/2025 at 12:08:41 AM

IWNO, thanks.

by montag

4/23/2025 at 12:42:47 AM

I was not.. oware either, also thanks.

by OJFord

4/23/2025 at 4:44:58 AM

it was not obvious, thanks

by j16sdiz

4/22/2025 at 8:57:05 PM

It's not _just_ the infrastructure that is awesome for homebrew. The help I got from the team, answering in real-time when I didn't know how to get through the CI bugs is amazing. It's the boring maintainence work that makes it so special for me.

I also feel that there could be a lot of automation in the backend part, catching bugs early (maybe even on local machine before CI run) for example.

by xiphias2

4/23/2025 at 1:51:47 AM

I think you mean “the hell I got from the team”.

I wonder if anything changed substantially over the years to make you say that?

by KolenCh

4/23/2025 at 4:47:33 AM

I feel like it's quite rude to deny to someone's lived experience and then ask what might have changed to make them feel that way.

by saagarjha

4/23/2025 at 5:05:47 PM

To those who downvote, care to explain? Homebrew community is notorious in how they treat users on their GitHub Issues and I wonder why anyone is downvoting without showing how that situation have changed.

by KolenCh

4/23/2025 at 1:24:44 AM

Yeah, to me the language (ruby) has nothing to do with the success of Homebrew, it is entirely about the DX around backend packaging. The main reason I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew back in the day is because when a new version of [insert software here] was released, I could expect the brew package to be updated within days. MacPorts always lagged significantly behind, and oftentimes didn't have certain packages at all.

by fastball

4/23/2025 at 2:42:47 AM

As best I can tell, that's partially due to the size of the community, but also because Homebrew went out of their way to teach the system to fish via the 3(?) different kinds of "check for updates" built into the Formulae:

- GitHub release sniffing https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f...

- page scraping https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f... (and also per-content-type flavors json and presumably xml)

- links to other formulae (IOW cascading updates): https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f...

and then the $(brew livecheck) invocation which will do a subset, a curated list, or hypothetically all of them

I can't imagine why MacPorts or our new Sapphire friend couldn't adopt a similar strategy

by mdaniel

4/23/2025 at 3:00:26 AM

When Homebrew started (and when I switched) the community was significantly smaller than MacPorts. It is due to the system you mention (and the community that this MX in turn cultivated) that allowed brew to dominate the mac packaging market.

Absolutely MacPorts and Sapphire can adopt the same strategy, but the point is that brew already has, so what exactly would the benefit be? e.g. if the language of choice is effectively meaningless, re-writing homebrew in Rust serves effectively no purpose. This is contrasted with systems and software where the performance or correctness is the most important feature, and therefore RIIR can be a big win.

Said another way: Brew was not "re-write MacPorts in Ruby", it had much loftier goals which it then executed on effectively. Sapphire mostly seems to be "re-write Brew in Rust", without much beyond that. So the only real gain is a bit more performance out of the CLI.

by fastball

4/23/2025 at 4:48:35 AM

MacPorts already supports "livechecks" which do the same thing. It's just that there are fewer people who are doing this regularly.

by saagarjha

4/23/2025 at 2:09:45 AM

I completely agree. I think Ruby has actually been a pretty great boon of a language choice because of the formula DSL, but that goes back to the DX point and not something fundamental to the language.

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 2:45:51 AM

Merely for your consideration, Ruby is great if you live in that codebase all the time, but Ruby -- in general, not just Homebrew -- has indescribably bad discoverability. I mean that both in terms of "what can I write where my cursor is?" and its friend "where the hell did this symbol under my cursor come from?"

I'm acutely aware someone's going to say LSP something or Rubymine something else but as for drive-by contributions, ... anyway, like I said, just for your consideration

by mdaniel

4/25/2025 at 3:38:52 PM

I've tried to love Ruby and use it daily for money, but by far the best justifications I have for the RoR dev experience are: it keeps me employed, and it's great if you're the one who wrote everything.

by kusokurae

4/22/2025 at 8:29:12 PM

> but parallel downloads of things like bottles and DMGs is not an architectural limitation of Homebrew itself, but instead a conscious decision to trade some install speed for courtesy towards the services we fetch from

That doesn't make sense. As you say you're directing a huge volume of traffic so it makes no difference exactly when a user downloads a byte. It all gets smeared out. Only the total amount of data matters and that is unaffected by parallelism.

by IshKebab

4/22/2025 at 8:35:12 PM

> As you say you're directing a huge volume of traffic so it makes no difference exactly when a user downloads a byte. It all gets smeared out.

Homebrew's traffic pattern is not a uniform distribution. Package updates go out, and users download those packages in structured ways: there are spikes for MDM-managed Homebrew installations, spikes for cronjobs and CI/CD systems, spikes at 9AM on different coasts when developers sign into their machines, etc.

(How much this matters is also not uniform: it matters somewhat less for GitHub Packages - they should have a hefty CDN - and it matters somewhat more for Casks, which tend to be large DMGs hosted on individual servers.)

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 4:15:09 AM

Could you parallelize intelligently based on these heuristics? Like, say, whitelist GitHub and S3 for parallelizing

by internetter

4/23/2025 at 6:13:04 AM

When I asked a few years ago, the brew maintainer said "parallelizing at this scale would hurt github, source: I work for github"

by SonOfLilit

4/23/2025 at 7:12:59 AM

Definitely sounds like one of those "I don't want to do it because it's work, but I don't want to admit that so here's a spurious technical reason" excuses to me.

If spikes at midnight etc are an issue just automatically disabled parallel downloads around midnight. Or only use them when running in a terminal. I really doubt it is an issue for GitHub though.

by IshKebab

4/23/2025 at 12:31:17 PM

Can you think of any more charitable reason than this? I think it beggars belief that Homebrew isn’t interested in improving performance; it’s something we talk about constantly and is one of our largest and most consistent user asks.

(It’s not just midnight, or terminals, as mentioned, not that either of these is really a “just”. And it’s not just GitHub, as mentioned.)

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 4:41:47 PM

To be clear I think "it's a lot of work and we don't want to deal with the complexity" is a totally valid reason. I have that reason for not doing a ton of things.

I just don't think "it shouldn't be done" is really the true reason. It's very tempting to say that though because it sounds like a stronger defense than "I don't want to". I think some people that do it don't even realise.

by IshKebab

4/23/2025 at 3:23:22 PM

(In this subthread it is just github because we were discussing enabling parallelism for github only. The terminal proposal meant "keep it single thread for CI")

by SonOfLilit

4/23/2025 at 4:10:17 PM

Okay. The problem is still present in the GH case, although to a lesser extent.

These kinds of complications on a "same experience for everyone" flow are also nontrivial: single-threading on CI is hard to explain to users who see very fast local installs and slow CI installs - the latter costs them extra money! - and complicates the story with mirrors, download groups that include non-GH origins, etc.

That's not to say it's impossible; as linked in another thread, it's something that's being actively worked on. But I think it should be understandable why "just parallelize it and you're wrong/stupid/lazy because you haven't already" is neither a contextualized or charitable response.

by woodruffw

4/24/2025 at 5:24:54 AM

I agree that the brew devs are not stupid or lazy (as can be seen by the great popularity of the tool they developed among the complaining demographic).

I suspect they are wrong in this specific care based on the "every other package manager solved this" heuristic, but I have no doubt this is not a straightforward issue.

Personally, I dropped the case after offering to send a PR and getting back a "we won't accept this, it's not because we didn't think of it, from where we're standing it's a bad idea". They may or may not be wrong, but X am definitely wrong here, knowing almost nothing about it.

by SonOfLilit

4/22/2025 at 7:29:17 PM

This looks like a fun little project, nice work!

I'm not a big fan of keeping the Homebrew terminology though. I never know what a formula, keg, cask, cellar, tap or bottle is. Why not keep to the standard terms of package and repository etc? I don't know beer brewing terminology or how beer brewing is analogous to package management, and I honestly wish that it wasn't something which my tools expect me to learn.

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 8:39:48 PM

Please kill the Homebrew terminology if you can! Its idiosyncratic names are the bane of my existence; it might have been cute in 2010, but it's frustrated me ever since.

I don't want to memorise their twee names; I'd much rather the name tell me what the entity / operation does by itself.

by Philpax

4/22/2025 at 8:46:32 PM

Cute names for standard things is one of my software bug bears, i.e. pet peeves, i.e. annoyances. Ruby gems and rust crates and something something beans. It is cute jargon and it annoys me to hide the definition inside a language specific terminology.

by ok_computer

4/22/2025 at 8:53:20 PM

It's actually one of the main reasons I landed on using Axum for a web server in Rust instead of Rocket: I got fed up with the additional level of semantic indirection the cutesy names added. I didn't wanna burn brain cycles decoding what it means to install fairings or launch rockets, or what "ignition" means contra "liftoff". I like boring names for things.

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 10:16:29 PM

> I like boring names for things.

It’s not that I like boring. But I really like descriptive names. I have other things to do with my time than figuring out what the hell a cask, a tap, or a bottle is. Like solving the problem that requires the damn software.

by kergonath

4/23/2025 at 4:28:52 PM

Löve (lua thing for graphics / games) historically had this but the names were all sex-related (SECS, LUBE, COCK, AnAl, HUMP, Polygamy, Swingers, Quickie). None of the project names were metaphorically related to their functions.

It's toned down lately and a ton of projects have been renamed, though not scrubbed, so the old names are still in the code and some documentation uses the old names. Also, you can't rewrite tens of thousands of forum posts from 2010 that use the older names that show up while searching for issues.

by philsnow

4/22/2025 at 7:57:08 PM

I will probably change the terminology at some point for this. For initially building it it is way easier to keep them the same though as trying to understand brew itself (at least for me) isn't so straight forward. It's a massive project

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:16:04 PM

Kudos for your humility.

I'd agree that the current homebrew terms are inappropriately whimsical and hard to grasp, but you are right in your intuition and goal, IMO.

That is, taking care of the gears first and then carefully adjusting the public API.

by moritzwarhier

4/22/2025 at 8:39:14 PM

As an experienced homebrewer, I don't think knowing about making beer makes it any clearer to me. Why do I need to install Docker from a Cask? Oh, it's because on Mac, a Cask is actually a Mac package (DMG or PKG or something). It's just arbitrary beer-flavored terminology.

No different than the Windows registry, which apparently uses a honeybee / hive metaphor because some Windows dev hated bees and their teammates liked trolling them.

by QuercusMax

4/22/2025 at 8:54:20 PM

That one was non-obvious to me as well, but I am sympathetic to the need to call them something. Not trying to bikeshed, but if there was a single obvious name for them then you would have used it instead of “DMG or PKG or something”.

by Lammy

4/23/2025 at 12:04:33 AM

Certainly, but I'm sure there's a more descriptive name than "cask"!

by Philpax

4/23/2025 at 2:27:56 PM

The nice thing about new terms is they don’t have overlapping meanings with existing ones. And FFS why do people want to suck the joy and frivolity out of everything?

by chuckadams

4/23/2025 at 1:52:49 AM

A HIVE is the only nonsensical name in the registry; everything else is keys, subkeys, or values.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/stru...

That said, the registry has been around for ~30 years and the terminology is well known to Windows users. It didn't build off of previously available terminology.

Homebrew just made shit up on the spot based on the project's name to be internally consistent with itself.

Microsoft has it's own fsckery of randomly named cute crap elsewhere, of course.

by p_ing

4/22/2025 at 10:47:03 PM

Yes! A thousand times yes. Homebrew terminology makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever and I find it irritating when I encounter it every now and then (like when a package says tap something and then install it blah blah)

I wish they’d just call them binaries, macOS packages, packages, gui-packages, etc.

To be clear, all those words are also jargon but they’re reusable concepts across software.

by atonse

4/22/2025 at 7:56:07 PM

Agreed. Come to think of it Homebrew has pretty bad ergonomics in general. What i want is an overview of compiled binaries, where they are, and what their versions are. That’s it.

by seumars

4/22/2025 at 11:20:10 PM

`brew ls --versions` + `brew list | xargs brew list`

Everything you need is there...

by meesles

4/22/2025 at 8:03:40 PM

Nowadays, normal users don't need to know. They just "brew install <name>".

by bartvk

4/22/2025 at 8:08:02 PM

I disagree. I need to understand what Homebrew means when it says that a cask is keg-only or whatever, or what it means to tap a cellar or whatever when I wanna add repositories. The documentation and '--help' output also refers to the beer brewing terms, not standard package management terms.

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 8:39:24 PM

Some reason I just died laughing. Really struggled with all that stuff while building this, just seemed to make no sense in the beginning. Maybe I should do /opt/sapphire/cave, opt/sapphire/cove and opt/sapphire/quarry for mine haha

by alexykn

4/25/2025 at 3:44:46 PM

I always found terminology like this refreshing. You don’t need to know it for 99% of interactions and really only need to know it if you’re building formulae. But what’s with all the engineers complaining because someone made a fun project? Why does everything have to be tediously serious?

by tekknik

4/23/2025 at 1:15:29 AM

I agreee with this, but is there a “standard” of terms? “repo” I understand to be a git repo, with all it entails. But, “package”, “library”, “module”? It seems like different languages have differenct usages.

by ks2048

4/22/2025 at 7:16:35 PM

I was a macports user but had to switch to homebrew because most new projects went there and it was generally easier to write Formulars etc. But I never really liked the project. I think writing a new package manager on top of brew infrastructure won‘t create a better setup. I don‘t know if all casks and Formulars only use the DSL stanzas or if still some use custom ruby functions and helpers. Because otherwise this new tool might need to eval ruby scripts for backwards compatibility.

by larusso

4/22/2025 at 10:03:35 PM

I loved macports, mostly because I wanted to create a new user account for a project and got bitten with the permissions thing by homebrew. I don’t mind typing sudo.

by skydhash

4/23/2025 at 4:16:19 AM

Any idea what's up with MacPorts lately? Packages I needed to install were uncharacteristically broken or out of date which wasn't a thing ever since I switched from Fink ages ago. Apple used to use MacPorts internally and put resources into but they stopped doing so?

by tannhaeuser

4/23/2025 at 3:01:05 PM

Didn‘t use it for quite some time now. I actually switched to nix packages for a while and was happy. Even worked in tandem with brew but I had a glibc issue on my shared Linux setup I could not resolve. I‘m still on nixos on Linux and tested nix on macOS again with flakes. I‘m not there yet to fully commit though.

by larusso

4/23/2025 at 3:14:46 AM

Why didn't you like the project if it was a better project by most definitions of what makes a good package manager? e.g. what did you want from a package manager besides 1. easy to install packages 2. readily updated packages.

by fastball

4/23/2025 at 3:51:43 AM

macports had the cleaner packages. Macports created its own base library so that packages are not based on the macOS system libraries which managed to break them when doing system updates with brew or when you decided to stay longer on an older macOS version. That meant that packages from macports took longer to install and compile. That was from the time when bottles where not a thing yet. Brew was fast but unstable. In my opinion the inferior project won. But to brews defence they also addressed the issues over the years. Don‘t have any sources at hand but I remember a time when the brew project compared itself to macports and pointed out that their faster because they don‘t recompile all base libraries etc etc. And they had to realize that this wasn‘t a great idea. Now packages are practically split between different os versions. And different bottles are served depending which macOS version you run.

Edit: And I got reminded that it was possible to run and install packages for and from multiple users. Brew took over /usr/local/bin and other /usr/local/homebrew for the running user. Managing a system with multiple users with brew was and still is hard. With macports you needed sudo like with most other package managers. The sudo less nature was a huge deal for its adoption. And now maybe a security risk if you ask me.

by larusso

4/23/2025 at 8:49:33 AM

macports eventually got an infrastructure that allowed binaries to be downloaded so no need for compilation on your local machine. SO the speed issue went away but too late as Hom,ebrew had gained the mind share

by pasc1878

4/23/2025 at 5:17:03 AM

> 1. easy to install packages 2. readily updated packages.

Not OP, but I want my package manager to have good UX around package installs and updates, not it deciding to update a Python major version because a random small thing I'm installing it requests it.

by sofixa

4/23/2025 at 10:21:39 AM

Their maintainers have a rather dubious anti-user history with opt-out analytics and forced auto updates to said analytics.

by dur-randir

4/22/2025 at 9:39:09 PM

Suggestion: create a Goals/Motivation/Rationale section in the README. What are the problems with Homebrew you're trying to solve? Why should a prospective user install and try this tool instead of staying with Homebrew?

by ARandomerDude

4/22/2025 at 8:12:25 PM

Homebrew sure has room for improvement, as most software does, and I appreciate every effort to replace and renew what we have with something better. But my own grievances with Homebrew isn't with the codebase itself.

What discourages me from using Homebrew is the intent and the mindset of its developers and packagers, who, I think, see their goal building an "unstable" distribution, as Debian defines it: "[a distribution that] is run by developers and those who like to live on the edge".

I am not blaming the Homebrew developers for building a Sid rather than Bookworm. Some people want just that. Heck, I used to run Debian Sid myself, but have lost my patience for maintaining my own computers since: I am kept busy enough by fixing the software I write, I don't want to spend more time fixing software I did not.

by selkin

4/22/2025 at 8:35:22 PM

I mainly disagree with the Homebrew stance on sudo/root. They claim it's better to install everything under a user dir, but 10% of the time that doesn't work for whatever reason, and tons of users have screwed up their permissions trying to fix it. No other package manager has this issue.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:00:43 PM

I would've been alright if they actually installed stuff in a user dir under the user's home folder, but it's insane to have a system-wide /opt/homebrew owned by whatever user happened to run the installer. Very icky.

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 9:11:23 PM

It is possible to install Homebrew itself and the software it packages under your home folder[0], though that configuration is not officially supported.

This is how I install Homebrew when I have to, and so far the only issue I ran into is that binary packages are often tagged as installable only to Homebrew's default folder, so Homebrew had to built the to-be-installed software from source instead, resulting in it taking longer and the computer fans spinning louder.

[0] https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere-unsupported

by selkin

4/22/2025 at 8:58:28 PM

I am not too fond of this design for reasons of privilege separation and FHS-alignment, but can accept it as most Homebrew users don't have their Macintosh computers used by multiple people.

by selkin

4/23/2025 at 9:46:37 AM

My Macs aren’t used by multiple people but they are multi-user systems. At minimum I have work and personal accounts, often project-specific accounts too. Homebrew is really bad at this and I was hoping anything that came along to replace it would do better. All the similar tools like APT etc. can handle this, it’s such a pain that Homebrew makes it difficult.

by JimDabell

4/23/2025 at 6:27:48 PM

And it's multi-user in a way even if you only have one account, cause the other account is root, and some stuff besides Homebrew will install as root.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:08:33 PM

My machine is single-user, problem is some things require root. Maybe they shouldn't according to Homebrew's stance on permissions, but idk, I'm working with what I've got.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:15:51 PM

Can you give a concrete example?

I know why certain software has be run with root privileges, but it's a bit hard for me to come with a reasonable scenario where a software would fail to run properly when installed to a directory that is owned by the same non-root user that launches that software.

by selkin

4/22/2025 at 9:22:45 PM

The symptom was something like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16432071/how-to-fix-home... , which btw has a terrible accepted answer. I forget the root cause (no pun intended), possibly some bad interaction with stuff I installed outside of Homebrew. It's also possible I did something wrong, but even then there's something to be said about so many users having the same problem uniquely with Homebrew.

Lemme try to repro again when I'm home.

by frollogaston

4/23/2025 at 8:33:17 AM

this kind of errors are quite common with Homebrew in my experience. if you did anything "wrong", then it's something really easy to do wrong which lots of other (me included) have done wrong at some point, and that the software should help to prevent

by agos

4/23/2025 at 3:44:45 PM

Digging through it more, it seems like Homebrew didn't play nice with anything else that used that dir. Maybe it's less of a problem now that it installs to /opt/homebrew, but I imagine there are still times Homebrew needs to place files in root-owned dirs or next to them.

This issue is also brought up in the Github commit posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43766371 "I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink)."

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 8:27:41 PM

If I understand correctly, running a Debian-style stable repo would essentially require forking all distributed software and backporting security fixes to them.

With many macOS users coming from a different communities than Debian users, I really wonder how well that would go over with the folks whose software was being distributed.

by jamesgeck0

4/22/2025 at 8:54:09 PM

Caveat lector, as I didn't collect the data to back this, but I would be extremeley surprised to find more than a few dozen of non-cask packages in Homebrew that contain Macintosh only software.

by selkin

4/23/2025 at 12:52:22 AM

There are rolling distros on Linux that are remarkably stable. My current Linux distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed is one. And on macOS you already have an immutable system partition that provides a stable base to build on top of, so I fail to see the value proposition of a package manager on macOS that's deliberately slow.

by kccqzy

4/22/2025 at 10:29:17 PM

I used to be a big fan of Homebrew but switch to Nix about 2 years ago. For the most part, it works great with home manager for me. Many tools can be installed with breeze just like breeze albeit a bit quicker. The critical thing for me is that Nix doesn't polute my Mac environment like Brew does. But, I admit that this is just for tools. For dev environment I usually just fall back to the language specific methods like cargo, uv or npm.

by mrbonner

4/23/2025 at 4:20:06 AM

Funny, I gave up on nix-darwin recently after a year, and went back to homebrew.

Trying to manage nix was more work than I wanted to do.

by KingMob

4/22/2025 at 10:50:12 PM

Some GUI-based applications tend to require too much hassle with Nix so I personally install those with brew. But I still use home manager on top of everything.

by nicce

4/22/2025 at 8:45:31 PM

Anyway, please do not expect progress to be too rapid. I have a full time job and do most work on this on weekends. I fully intend to make it a stable, "finished" (as much as this is possible in software) thing, it will take a while though. If anyone want's to help out I do open the bugs I find as Issues to keep track and give people an idea of things that do not work. Good Night!

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 8:48:55 PM

Consider rebranding to a 4 letter name or even better a 3 letter one.

I know it sounds dumb but uv was smart to go shorter than pip and sapphire feels heavier than brew no matter what it does after typing that.

by whywhywhywhy

4/23/2025 at 3:19:33 AM

The name of the project doesn't need to be the same as the CLI, e.g. Homebrew -> brew.

This could be Sapphire -> sap

by fastball

4/22/2025 at 8:51:32 PM

I know, probably will, also feel typing out sapphire for the command all the time is annoying + sapp would be weird. For me technical implementation comes first though. I'll do that when something comes to mind

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 9:08:13 PM

'sph' doesn't seem too bad though.

by syvolt

4/22/2025 at 9:59:29 PM

This reminds me of the PIK image format (a precursor to JPEG XL) whose name happens to be a word for penis in some languages[0]. In the present case "SPH" is a kink/fetish term meaning "Small Penis Humiliation"[1]. I don't know how many people would think of that, though.

I am not sure if the lesson is to try harder to avoid offence, or live with the fact that words can have multiple meanings and we can be "professional" enough to ignore some of those meanings in some contexts.

[0]: https://github.com/google/pik/issues/6

[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sph

by cfreksen

4/22/2025 at 8:51:28 PM

Yeah i vote it should be rebranded “why”

by jdeaton

4/22/2025 at 8:53:07 PM

command: why install htop, -> install start: because you wan' it -> done: you got it

Something like that you mean?

by alexykn

4/22/2025 at 9:35:17 PM

I would love if the way to respond "yes" to the CLI is "why not"

by Asraelite

4/22/2025 at 10:06:14 PM

Why not.

by Ringz

4/23/2025 at 9:11:58 AM

Obvious joke is obvious... but it seems the "motivation" is to write a project in rust.

by Rodmine

4/22/2025 at 9:26:51 PM

Perhaps _why?

by chucksmash

4/23/2025 at 3:20:33 AM

In my experience, rewriting software doesn't work. You should replace the components iteratively in Homebrew itself if you want your ideas to succeed. I doubt your software will see any major adoption just because you wrote it in some other language. The word Homebrew is culturally significant in hacker groups as well and sapphire is not.

by TriangleEdge

4/23/2025 at 3:25:33 AM

Yeah that’s not possible.

by adamnemecek

4/22/2025 at 8:31:23 PM

I’m really happy with my MacPorts.

by hnarayanan

4/22/2025 at 10:40:36 PM

This isn't a HB replacement, it's just using HB binaries. It doesn't replace HB at all. HB and this aren't full package managers when they don't officially or technically support building from source or working independently of another project's infrastructure.

A decent full package manager would support a simple, shell-like DSL like say Alpine or Arch, concurrent and parallel phases (such as downloads/builds/installs), multiple versions, reproducible builds, building from source, build acceleration, security auditing, patch management, and package cryptographic signatures (not hashes or signing of hashes).

Nix is theoretically amazing but the barrier-to-entry and gotchas for popular use make it self-limiting. Simplicity in particular areas is a price that is often paid for popularity.

by cantrecallmypwd

4/22/2025 at 9:19:55 PM

Please give it an easier command name than ‘sapphire’ if you want to win people over to use it. Double in size and three times as hard to remember (or type) than ‘brew’. Even cli peeps are still just people

by maartn

4/25/2025 at 6:43:08 AM

Sounds good. But what are the advantages of implementing a package manager in Rust? I'd think languages with dynamic features would be more extensible and easier to iterate on.

by okcdz

4/22/2025 at 7:21:00 PM

I wish homebrew was a little more friendly to installing in a directory other than what the installer sets. I used to have a lot of permissions issues back when /usr/local was the only directory and none since I started installing it in ~/.brew

by hk1337

4/22/2025 at 7:45:27 PM

For the last 5 years (since Apple Silicon was released), Homebrew has installed to /opt/homebrew by default.

by runjake

4/22/2025 at 9:02:06 PM

No, it only does that on Apple Silicon. To this day, if you run the latest Homebrew on an Intel Mac running the latest macOS, it will install to /usr/local.

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 10:26:45 PM

The parent indicates in a comment that they use an Apple Silicon Mac[1].

I don't see a lot of engineers running Intel Macs anymore. I haven't seen any engineers who still use an Intel model, myself, and for quite some time. Especially when there are Apple Silicon options for well under $1,000 that highly outperform the Intel models.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43267210

by runjake

4/23/2025 at 4:21:03 AM

[flagged]

by KingMob

4/23/2025 at 12:56:30 AM

I don’t want it there either. The install script is defines the install directory without anyway to override it. It sets it to /usr/local or /opt/homebrew depending on the result of uname command.

I like it in ~/.brew where I have full permission to it and only my user.

by hk1337

4/23/2025 at 5:15:27 AM

As described on https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere-unsupported:

> Technically, you can just extract (or git clone) Homebrew wherever you want.

However, Homebrew maintainers are dickish about essentially banning you from contributing to the project if your installation is nonstandard. They have a similarly discouraging warning if you are running a developer beta, which has turned me off of contributing fixes to broken formulas lest they reject them.

> If you decide to use another prefix: don’t open any issues, even if you think they are unrelated to your prefix choice. They will be closed without response.

by rgovostes

4/23/2025 at 3:01:38 AM

There’s also `cart` : https://github.com/heywoodlh/cart

I especially like their claim of being unprivileged. Very early stages just like Sapphire.

by microflash

4/22/2025 at 11:03:52 PM

Really glad to see that someone has started on a Mac package manager written in Rust.

A couple purely superficial suggestions (echoing some other comments here):

- Lose the Brew terminology, especially if the name of the project isn't a synonym of "brew." - Change the name in general. "Sapphire" makes me think of "Ruby." IMO the obvious name is MacPac :p

by rewgs

4/22/2025 at 8:27:10 PM

If this provided support for multi-user setup without the user switching gymnastics of homebrew, then I'd be interested.

by commandersaki

4/22/2025 at 7:02:10 PM

FWIW the author of Homebrew is also working on a next generation package manager in rust: https://pkgx.dev/ (beware facebook tracking and infinite AI slop)

by benatkin

4/22/2025 at 7:20:46 PM

Wow. They really don't want anyone to take this project seriously! This is actually making me reconsider having brew installed even...

https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/pull/5360#issuecomment-233...

by Zambyte

4/22/2025 at 7:33:19 PM

Is this the guy who was complaining that he didn't get hired by Google even though he made brew? Maybe there were personality issues at play...

by schnable

4/22/2025 at 7:36:10 PM

I checked out his X account and yep, that's the guy.

by Zambyte

4/23/2025 at 12:01:16 AM

If you search for "max howell google interview" it comes up, if you search for "max howell alphabet interview", no dice.

by benatkin

4/22/2025 at 7:38:45 PM

This has nothing to do with Homebrew. It's a different project.

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 8:04:45 PM

Yeah, but the relationship makes my spidey senses tingle even if it's not accurate.

by Zambyte

4/23/2025 at 12:21:09 AM

Is there something horrible I'm missing here? It's just a not so well designed page of links to Github repos.

Edit: Oh, the Github issue, yeah that's screwed up.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:13:33 PM

Consider re-attuning your spidey senses away from inaccurate things!

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 7:25:44 PM

Creator, not current maintainer. Homebrew is currently maintained by over a dozen people, myself included.

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 7:16:21 PM

Oof. Those AI images really harm the credibility of the package manager.

by joshuaturner

4/22/2025 at 7:19:58 PM

I both like and dislike them. First thing I searched for was the prompts, but I haven't found them yet.

As for Facebook tracking I 100% dislike that.

by benatkin

4/22/2025 at 7:11:43 PM

What’s the deal with the cautious warnings? Is homebrew being replaced by software developed using a “vibing coding” or what have you?

by no_wizard

4/22/2025 at 7:14:20 PM

if you see the issue I linked, there are a lot of thumbs up / thumbs down in the comments, it's not just me =)

by benatkin

4/22/2025 at 10:44:56 PM

I think I lack context enough that even the link doesn't make it very clear to me.

by no_wizard

4/23/2025 at 12:57:52 AM

mxcl is the owner of this other project and also the original creator of Homebrew. Someone asked politely to remove a broken package from the list, mxcl gave an oddly combative response, then you see the rest.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 7:10:49 PM

AI slop, but also for all the imagery. The early 00s called, and want their large icons back. This is the worst landing page I’ve seen—almost screams crypto-scam.

by mimischi

4/22/2025 at 11:40:26 PM

Homebrew was kind of slow, at one point, but I find that it works pretty well these days. Still, this is pretty cool and competitions is always good.

Interestingly, I always imagined that a would-be replacement would come written in Swift. I guess I was wrong.

by vmsp

4/23/2025 at 8:11:05 AM

Why is parity with home brew the bar? Add something else great, like the ability to pin versions and not always install everything at head. Give me a reason to stop using home brew

by MarkMarine

4/23/2025 at 2:22:19 PM

One small note - it’s quite easy to make a mistake typing “sapphire” command, especially if you have dyslexia.

Is it possible to have more short command name?

by smetannik

4/22/2025 at 8:21:03 PM

Cool, but why not use https://mise.jdx.dev/ ?

by oulipo

4/22/2025 at 8:37:26 PM

That's a totally different tool. Brew is a generic package manager that installs ... basically everything. Mise is specifically for managing compilers and associated tooling. You can't install libgmp or mplayer with Mise.

by IshKebab

4/22/2025 at 8:44:31 PM

I'm still not sure if I like the fact that the package management part of mise relies on a bunch of third-party package managers / repositories like asdf, aqua,...

by trallnag

4/22/2025 at 8:34:31 PM

Because I haven’t heard of it until now?

by Alifatisk

4/23/2025 at 1:36:30 PM

I used to donate to the Homebrew project and actually liked it, until it's enshitification a few years ago.

* excessive superflurious animations? hell yeah

* emojis everywhere? of course!

* forced updates on by default

* breaking updates? thanks your problem noob. Try to keep up.

* versioning? lol, this isn't NASA

* backwards compatibility? Lol. come on, we redesigned the standard, the right way, the 5th time this time.

Its easy to criticize open source when you're not contributing, but thats why I sent my dollars over there, as I couldn't donate my time. Frustrating.

by exabrial

4/23/2025 at 7:18:14 AM

Looks awesome. Thanks for your hard work, I will try this out at some point :)

by snekcaseenjoyer

4/22/2025 at 8:41:44 PM

I just want the equivalent of `sudo apt-get install` on Mac, with the same exact commands.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:07:09 PM

The thing you want then is `fink`, which literally uses dpkg and apt.

by jen20

4/22/2025 at 9:16:34 PM

That sounds like what I want. Seems to only have "wip" support for the newer macOSes though. I also remember using the Debian packager on iPhone back in the golden age of jailbreaking.

by frollogaston

4/23/2025 at 7:29:02 PM

Yeah, I thought I had edited my post to say it doesn't look to still be alive (apparently I did not!) - that's a shame, having diversity in this space is good.

by jen20

4/23/2025 at 2:44:41 PM

I think the best replacement is still MacPorts.

by rbanffy

4/23/2025 at 6:57:16 AM

still, nothing can replace macports for me, ever

by MelodyUwU

4/23/2025 at 7:53:42 AM

I use Macports on my work Macbook, but I'd love for Portage prefix to be fully functional on ARM Mac, personally. The tool interface is just so much better.

by a-french-anon

4/24/2025 at 12:36:05 PM

on contrast, I have a 32bit macbook pro on snow leopard, so none of these shiny tools can be even remotely useful to me (sapphire being arm only? yeah, that)

by MelodyUwU

4/22/2025 at 9:51:45 PM

wen linux

by moonlion_eth

4/22/2025 at 7:15:03 PM

> WARNING: ALPHA SOFTWARE > Sapphire is experimental, under heavy development, and may be unstable. Use at your own risk!

Ruby seems fine for brew. Does this do anything else better? Ruby makes it easy to write recipes for it which is a huge boon for a package manager.

by elcritch

4/22/2025 at 7:22:12 PM

My thoughts exactly.

The main reason I find brew to be a bit slow is just a lack of parallelism with regards to downloads and installs. Rather brew does alternating and sequential D, I, D, I, D, I, when I wish it just kept downloading in the background when it is doing the installs. It would cut down the brew upgrade time by 30% or more at the cost of more disk space used during the process.

But this one qualm I have isn't a result of its language implementation at all.

by bhouston

4/22/2025 at 7:48:55 PM

FWIW: a longstanding limitation for parallel downloads within Homebrew isn't architectural (it's not too hard to add!) but structural with respect to Homebrew's download sources: GitHub and others are very gracious with the amount of traffic we send their way, and we don't want to overtax services that have other major consuming parties.

(This is a perverse countereffect: small projects can make performance decisions that Homebrew and other larger projects can't make, because they don't have a large install base that reveals the limitations of those decisions.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 7:55:39 PM

> FWIW: a longstanding limitation for parallel downloads within Homebrew isn't architectural (it's not too hard to add!) but structural with respect to Homebrew's download sources

I have heard that before.

Hmm.... I wonder if you can get away with not doing parallel downloads, but just keep the sequential downloads going in the background while it is installing a package? It is the pause in downloads during an install that I find is the main slow down in brew.

by bhouston

4/22/2025 at 8:00:16 PM

> I wonder if you can get away with not doing parallel downloads, but just keep the sequential downloads going in the background while it is installing a package?

I could be wrong, but I believe multiple people, including maintainers, have looked into exactly that :-)

(I also need to correct myself: there is some work ongoing into concurrent downloads[1]. That work hasn't hit `brew install` yet, where I imagine the question of concurrent traffic volume will become more pressing.)

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/18278

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 8:10:14 PM

P2P protocols like BitTorrent are made for this kind of problem.

by hackingonempty

4/22/2025 at 8:15:39 PM

Sure. There's also a reason no major OSS packaging ecosystem uses these protocols: the only thing worse than a slow distribution scheme is an unreliable one. Combine that with the (reasonable) lack of a reward scheme for seeding an OSS packaging ecosystem, and you have a distribution mechanism that's significantly more brittle than the current "throw a lot of bandwidth at it" approach.

(Among other technical challenges, like updating the P2P broadcast for each new bottle.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 8:38:27 PM

I think you are misinformed as BitTorrent, for instance, is much more reliable than https alone. The reward scheme is built in already: the client uploads while it's downloading and installing and prioritizes the clients it is downloading from. At worst, the reliability and performance are the same as the web seed.

Generating additional metadata at bottle build time doesn't appear to be much of a technical challenge either.

by hackingonempty

4/22/2025 at 8:59:22 PM

> The reward scheme is built in already: the client uploads while it's downloading and installing and prioritizes the clients it is downloading from.

These are asymmetric: brew runs at a point in time, and most people decidedly do not want brew running in the background or blocking while leechers are still being serviced. They want it to exit quickly once the task at hand is done.

> Generating additional metadata at bottle build time doesn't appear to be much of a technical challenge either.

That's not the challenge. The challenge is distributing those updates. My understanding is that there's no standard way to update a torrent file; you re-roll a new file with the changes. That means staggered delivery, which in turn means a long tail of clients that see different, incompatible views of the same majority-equal files.

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 10:06:06 PM

> My understanding is that there's no standard way to update a torrent file; you re-roll a new file with the changes.

Kinda. You do create a new torrent, but you distribute it in a way that to a swarm member is functionally equivalent to updating an old one. Check out BEP-0039 and BEP-0046 which respectively cover the HTTP and DHT mechanisms for updating torrents:

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

If that updated torrent is a BEP-0052 (v2) torrent it will hash per-file, and so the updated v2 torrent will have identical hashes for files which aren't changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html

This combines with BEP-0038 so the updated torrent can refer to the infohash of the older torrent with which it shares files, so if you already have the old one you only have to download files that have changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html

by Lammy

4/22/2025 at 10:16:24 PM

That’s very cool! That addresses the basic update issue, although I would be surprised if there was a production-ready Ruby library for torrents that included these. The state of HTTP(S) in Ruby is sad enough :-)

(There’s also still the state/seeding problem and its collision with user expectations around brew getting faster, or at least not any slower.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 10:33:27 PM

I agree with you about package manager usage patterns being a poor fit for seeding by end users. I definitely wouldn't want my computer to participate.

I could see institutional seeders doing it as a way to donate bandwidth though, like a CDN that's built into the distribution protocol instead of getting load-balanced to Microsoft's nearest PoP when hitting a GitHub `ghcr.io` URI like Homebrew does today. Or even better, use that as an HTTP Seed (BEP-0019) to combine benefits of both :)

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html

by Lammy

4/22/2025 at 11:13:17 PM

Yeah, something at the institutional layer makes sense. Thank you for sharing these links!

(My skepticism around whether this makes sense for Homebrew might be obscuring it, but I’m generally quite a big fan of distributed/P2P protocols, and I strongly believe that existing CDN decencies in packaging ecosystems are a risk that needs mitigating.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 11:09:33 PM

There isn't an update issue. BitTorrent metadata are hashes, they get updated and distributed at the same time as the current URLs and hashes in the same file or maybe in a similarly named file right next to it in the same pull request.

There is no state/seeding problem. The client downloads from the same https url as always but uses peers on an as-available basis to speed things up and reduce load on the origin.

by hackingonempty

4/22/2025 at 11:17:21 PM

The adjacent thread observes that there is an update issue, just one that has a technical solution.

> The client downloads from the same https url as always but uses peers on an as-available basis to speed things up and reduce load on the origin.

So some kind of hybrid scheme, which (to me) implies the worst of both worlds: clients are still going to hammer upstreams on package updates (since client traffic isn’t uniform), and every client pays a bunch of peering overhead that doesn’t pay off until the files are “hot.” In other words, upstreams still need to plan for the same amount of capacity, and clients have to do more work.

(The adjacent thread observes that none of this is necessary if CDNs or other large operators do this between themselves, rather than involving clients. That seems strictly preferable to me.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 9:57:36 PM

> These are asymmetric: brew runs at a point in time, and most people decidedly do not want brew running in the background or blocking while leechers are still being serviced. They want it to exit quickly once the task at hand is done.

Yes, brew exits when it is done installing, nothing would need to change about that if you used BT protocol to speed up downloads. I'm sure you do have some helpful users who would volunteer to seed their cache though, which would become feasible.

> That's not the challenge. The challenge is distributing those updates.

The metadata goes in the formula alongside the current metadata (URLs and hashes.)

by hackingonempty

4/22/2025 at 9:45:58 PM

> My understanding is that there's no standard way to update a torrent file; you re-roll a new file with the changes.

You should only re-distribute the original file that was downloaded and thus one can just advertise the original torrent that was downloaded.

But as you said earlier, brew is a point in time command and this BitTorrent solution would only really work if brew switched to an always-on service. And I am not sure that many people want to do that, although I am sure some would.

by bhouston

4/23/2025 at 5:52:30 AM

Homebrew packages are on the order of tens of megabytes. Plain old HTTPS downloads will complete faster than setting up a BitTorrent download.

Using BitTorrent is also a great way to get banned from company-owned laptops.

by Kwpolska

4/22/2025 at 8:12:56 PM

Good points, background downloads would speed it up.

And the language doesn’t have much to do with that. This project looks to be someone just toying around with Rust or their own PM. Props for that, but the headline has extra implications on HN.

I recently rewrote a big portion of Atlas [1]. It’s a Nim based dependency manager that clones Nim packages to a `deps/` folder. Initially I was worried about using reference types, etc, for performance reasons. It’s a general habit of mine. Then I remembered that stuff would be negligible compared to the download times and git overhead. Well aside from the SAT solver.

1: https://github.com/nim-lang/atlas

by elcritch

4/22/2025 at 7:28:35 PM

Ruby isn't web scale. Rust is web scale.

by lopatin

4/22/2025 at 7:31:50 PM

Homebrew is dog-slow. If this becomes yet another Rust tool that is 10x faster than the one that it replaces: great.

by MrBuddyCasino

4/22/2025 at 7:37:10 PM

Homebrew is 99% IO-bound and this will be too. Installing (prebuilt) packages doesn't require much logic. If this tool supports parallel downloads, it will be 10x faster than Homebrew, but it won't have anything to do with the language. The issue is finding a hosting provider willing to be DDOS'd for the good of the open-source community.

by rafram

4/22/2025 at 8:39:15 PM

Hmm I'm sure people said that about Pip before uv came along and was literally 10x faster.

To be fair I haven't noticed Brew being as tediously slow as Pip. Maybe I just use it way less.

by IshKebab

4/22/2025 at 9:16:41 PM

There are two things that work in `uv`'s favor (which, to be clear, is an incredible tool that I'm a big fan of):

1. Python packaging, unlike Homebrew, does have a compute-heavy phase in the form of dependency resolution. `uv` can make significant gains over `pip` in that phase.

2. `uv` performs parallel downloads and other operations, in part because of Rust's fearless parallelism.

Homebrew doesn't really have (1), since resolution is just a linearization of the dependency tree. And parallelism of downloads in (2) poses a problem for Homebrew that's been mentioned in other threads (whereas parallelism is not a significant problem for PyPI's CDN-fronted distribution).

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 9:31:31 PM

Python should be able to do parallel downloads at least, albeit having the overhead of multiple OS threads unless you're using asyncio.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 9:35:11 PM

Yep. The limitation in pip is architectural, not on Python's own side. However, there's been some progress there recently[1].

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/825

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 8:06:18 PM

> If this tool supports parallel downloads, it will be 10x faster than Homebrew, but it won't have anything to do with the language.

If this is true, why are the Rust tools, on average, so much faster than the JS (or whatever) tools they replace?

Hint: the answer hasn't just to do with the theoretical technical merits of the underlying platform, but also what type of developer they attract.

by MrBuddyCasino

4/22/2025 at 8:38:05 PM

Do you have an example of a faster Rust tool that replaced an IO-bound JS tool? The toolchain ones that got Rust replacements were CPU-bound afaik.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 7:33:47 PM

I use homebrew constantly but the only part I find slow is the custom installations of the software and the lack of downloading while installing? Neither of these is related to the implementation language.

What part of the home brew experience do you find slow?

eg...

% time brew upgrade

brew upgrade 0.75s user 0.16s system 68% cpu 1.337 total

% time brew list

brew list 0.01s user 0.02s system 57% cpu 0.054 total

by bhouston

4/23/2025 at 12:11:17 AM

The slowness comes from its serialized downloads and package installations. If you install a thing that has 10 dependencies, those 10 dependencies will serially install, likely taking many seconds.

by silverwind

4/22/2025 at 7:18:01 PM

It’s a real disservice to the project not to give a raison d’etre in the readme, or any kind of technical motivation / differences.

by azinman2

4/22/2025 at 7:56:40 PM

1. I thought "Sapphire is a next‑generation, Rust‑powered package manager inspired by Homebrew" covered it pretty well.

2. It's a personal project.

3. It's explicitly declared as alpha software.

by runjake

4/22/2025 at 8:44:47 PM

“ Sapphire is a next‑generation, Rust‑powered package manager inspired by Homebrew”

Doesn’t tell me how it differs. What makes this next generation? Just the programming language?

If it’s just a for fun personal project that no one else is supposed to use, I’m not sure why it’s on HN.

by azinman2

4/23/2025 at 7:14:50 AM

The author didn't submit it to HN, so criticizing it being on HN seems unfair to me.

It's a cool piece of alpha-quality software. It may or may not be meant to be used, that's beside the point. As I see it HN isn't a platform for software recommendations, it's for discussing interesting geeky things. Which this definitely is, even if it was completely unusable today.

by dancek

4/23/2025 at 3:28:27 PM

Doesn’t tell me how it differs

Not everything on HN has to come with a dissection and explanatory note - that's kind of the point of curiosity.

If it’s just a for fun personal project that no one else is supposed to use, I’m not sure why it’s on HN.

Those are totally fine on HN too.

by pvg

4/23/2025 at 3:31:52 PM

Except the title (previously) said homebrew replacement. So when it doesn’t say why/what, and there’s no context, people are going to be confused.

by azinman2

4/23/2025 at 4:56:41 PM

Sometimes titles are slightly wrong. It's just not that big of a deal, most of the time. It's a messageboard in large part about the pleasure of finding things out rather than the grump of not everything being exactly as you expect.

by pvg

4/22/2025 at 8:36:42 PM

Yeah, the HN title was editorialized as a Homebrew "replacement," which may be ticking people off.

by frollogaston

4/23/2025 at 3:17:11 AM

#1 is a "what", not a "why"

by fastball

4/22/2025 at 7:31:23 PM

> It’s a real disservice to the project not to give a raison d’etre in the readme, or any kind of technical motivation / differences.

This. There's a wave of projects whose only value proposition is this vacuous "let's reinvent the wheel in Rust" sales pitch, where nothing of value is proposed beyond throwing around the Rust buzzword.

by motorest

4/22/2025 at 8:34:40 PM

Is it really necessary to restate the advantages of rewriting in Rust in every such project? Compared to Ruby programs Rust programs are faster, more robust, more maintainable, and easier to install. That's pretty much the same for any Rust rewrite (e.g. uv).

It would be interesting to know if there are other goals though, e.g. UX improvements.

by IshKebab

4/22/2025 at 8:47:00 PM

The speed of homebrew has never been limiting factor (for me). I think there are far more important factors in what’s maintainable or not than language, and homebrew is very easy to install.

There has to be more important reasons to replace a mature widely use project like homebrew.

by azinman2

4/23/2025 at 1:21:35 AM

The issue with homebrew is not the programming language. The issue is homebrew itself. It takes forever to install packages, auto-updates without prompting you, etc. Also on my Mac it's been broken for years. It tries to auto-update and gets stuck forever.

https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/1177

by koakuma-chan

4/23/2025 at 5:12:00 AM

I've been using homebrew for years and never did I ever experienced anything I would classify as "broken".

The thread you posted is comical. How many times does anyone run homebrew per day? Or per week? And you still have people complaining about sub-second execution times of a list command? In an app whose happy flow is downloading hundreds of MB off the internet and save it to disk?

Is this your argument for a major rewrite?

by motorest

4/23/2025 at 6:04:03 AM

> Is this your argument for a major rewrite?

A major rewrite in Rust.

by koakuma-chan

4/23/2025 at 1:29:12 AM

> Is it really necessary to restate the advantages of rewriting in Rust in every such project?

I'm with you when the "source" project is C/C++ or something in that realm, but when we're coming from an already memory-safe language I do think some sort of explanation is helpful. I see Homebrew as more of a "glue" application where its own performance isn't exactly critical as it coordinates processes that are much slower so I don't really care if it's a bit faster.

by wolrah

4/23/2025 at 5:35:21 AM

> faster

By how much? Is homebrew really so slow, and used so often that an improvement would matter?

> more maintainable

[citation needed], especially for uv, which is a tool useful only for Python developers, so using a different language limits the pool of contributors.

by Kwpolska

4/22/2025 at 8:12:34 PM

Agreed - without clear performance metrics or feature differentiation in the README, potential users have no compelling reason to switch from a mature ecosystem like Homebrew to an alpha-stage alternative.

by ethan_smith

4/22/2025 at 6:49:09 PM

What is it doing better than homebrew ?

by nartho

4/22/2025 at 6:50:52 PM

Right now probably not much, it's WIP.

by adamnemecek

4/22/2025 at 6:56:20 PM

Having different project leadership is probably a big selling point ;)

by carterschonwald

4/22/2025 at 7:00:42 PM

What exactly went down with homebrew? Suddenly my employer was pulling it from every device and I never really got a solid explanation of why! I've not been able to get anything meaningful from searching on my own, obviously. Someone help a guy out?

by Henchman21

4/22/2025 at 7:05:01 PM

Homebrew itself is not bad, but it does allow users to install software from thirdparty sources, that are unvetted, or unverified. This could pose a security risk. I can see why some companies will disable homebrew. Especially for non-developers.

by israrkhan

4/22/2025 at 7:28:44 PM

Homebrew doesn't suddenly add that capability. It just facilitates it. If nothing else, it's easier to track what's been installed via brew than whatever the user may have curlbashed or untargzed to their home.

by cassianoleal

4/22/2025 at 7:10:04 PM

I think they’re specifically asking about the project as opposed to the tool

by no_wizard

4/22/2025 at 7:33:59 PM

So does sourceforge and GitHub and similar, are those blocked too?

by mort96

4/22/2025 at 6:58:08 PM

Does homebrew have bad leadership?

by adamnemecek

4/22/2025 at 11:51:14 PM

Some of their leadership has been heavy handed with regards to unpopular decisions, like removing options from packages.

by paradox460

4/22/2025 at 7:09:44 PM

I hope it is faster. Homebrew operations take forever for me.

by gkfasdfasdf

4/22/2025 at 7:22:05 PM

Ok, but then what goals do you have with it? What are you trying to solve/improve upon?

by carstenhag

4/22/2025 at 7:13:50 PM

Given homebrew was strictly worse than the tool it displaced, I’m not sure it’s the right question to ask. MacOS package management is strictly marketing based.

by StopDisinfo910

4/22/2025 at 7:21:43 PM

At the time I switched from macports to homebrew (years ago?), homebrew could install more things I needed without any errors. Many more.

That was it, that's why I switched, nothing more, nothing less.

by jrochkind1

4/22/2025 at 7:38:25 PM

This is why I switched as well. At that point the brew experience was a lot closer to that of apt on a Debian-based Linux distribution or something where you could reliably run “x install <pkgname>”, get up to go grab coffee, and come back to a useable newly installed package. Macports felt like it could throw errors because Venus was in retrograde sometimes.

by cosmic_cheese

4/22/2025 at 7:17:53 PM

That’s not fair. Homebrew has been fantastic. It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

by user82747493

4/22/2025 at 7:22:13 PM

They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).

by StopDisinfo910

4/22/2025 at 7:28:23 PM

Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience.

(Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 8:39:30 PM

Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity.

Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.

by StopDisinfo910

4/22/2025 at 9:14:41 PM

Found it because I was curious: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e...

Here are the comparisons to other package managers:

> Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

vs MacPorts registry which used its own homebrewed (lol) Receipts files in 2009, and now uses a SQLite DB: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#i...

> I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink).

vs MacPorts installs to `/opt/local` as root.

> Why Not MacPorts?

> =================

> 1. MacPorts installs its own libz, its own openssl, etc. It is an autarky.

> This makes no sense to me. OS X comes with all that shit.

> 2. MacPorts support Tiger, and PPC. We don't, so things are better optimised.

There is no “Why Not Fink?” section.

And because I didn't know the word autarky: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky

by Lammy

4/22/2025 at 9:37:54 PM

From 2009, so before my involvement. I'll note that this also says a bunch of things that aren't true in current-day Homebrew (Casks, for example, are distributions of .app bundles), so I think it'd be accurate to say that it doesn't reflect the project's current (or even past-decade) views.

by woodruffw

4/23/2025 at 12:02:26 AM

Things improved a lot as homebrew relearned the design constraints and reasons why MacPorts made the decisions they did, and wound up adopting many of the same solutions.

It was frustrating in the beginning to see so much marketing-driven shade being thrown from an ill-informed position.

Obviously that wasn’t you or the current maintainers of homebrew, and things have improved tremendously, but that’s the era from which frustration like the grandparent post originates.

by frumplestlatz

4/22/2025 at 11:59:05 PM

> Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

The worst part is that MacPorts already did the same thing, but used hardlinks to avoid the kinds of problems that emerge when (for example) `realpath` resolves a symlink to an unexpected versioned directory that’s supposed to be an implementation detail.

There was a lot of FUD, dishonesty, and shallow understanding from the homebrew creators in the beginning.

by frumplestlatz

4/22/2025 at 9:01:01 PM

> Just go read the original announcements of homebrew.

I can't find these anywhere on the official blog, which goes back to the first 1.0 release of Homebrew. Links would be helpful.

by woodruffw

4/22/2025 at 7:27:36 PM

> It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

I don’t think you are being fair. This question presupposes that the supposed problems can be solved by iterative changes, rather than being inherent in the chosen design/architecture of the software, which usually requires complete replacement thereof (as well as the leadership thereof, as people who choose poor solutions to problems often can’t appreciate arguments for superior solutions).

(Not that I’m trying to suggest that I agree that homebrew in particular is bad — just speaking generally.)

by cstrahan

4/22/2025 at 7:50:42 PM

Then fork it! Make a new or better one! Handwaving it’s not good does nothing for anyone

by user82747493

4/22/2025 at 8:40:51 PM

MacPorts is still around, and that's what I use.

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 7:22:21 PM

Not sure why the subtweet, but I'll guess it was macports, which in my experience was not as fun or easy as brew.

by anarticle

4/22/2025 at 7:20:07 PM

back in the day macports was a fucking nightmare. homebrew may not be perfect but it is popular for good reason.

by whalesalad

4/22/2025 at 7:18:27 PM

Macports was less ergonomic imho, which caused the community to shift to homebrew.

by lxe

4/22/2025 at 7:27:50 PM

This. There is plenty to dislike about Ruby, but it is exceptionally strong at implementing domain specific languages. Homebrew was able to use that to lower the barrier to packaging software.

Also, using Git + GitHub instead of SVN + Trac was absolutely a winning pick for scaling project participation back in the 2000s.

by cls59

4/23/2025 at 6:29:05 PM

Mainly cause there's no curl | bash way to install :D and also it wants you to update it each time you update macOS, which iirc requires a reboot too

I still use MacPorts though

by frollogaston

4/22/2025 at 7:15:49 PM

I doesn't have to do anything better. It's in Rust and that should be the only reason you need to switch.

by nottorp

4/22/2025 at 11:17:41 PM

so cool!, but can you invert a binary tree? /s

by renecito

4/23/2025 at 9:25:42 AM

[flagged]

by fkbrw

4/22/2025 at 7:33:48 PM

[flagged]

by risho

4/23/2025 at 4:26:03 PM

[flagged]

by indiansdontwipe

4/23/2025 at 4:50:38 PM

That’s right. Back in the day we used to have only clear and descriptive names, like C and GNU.

by dgfl

4/22/2025 at 8:38:53 PM

I'm really rooting for this. I can't wait for Homebrew replacements, what a pain it is.

by ansc

4/22/2025 at 8:47:42 PM

What is your pain point? If you don't elucidate your pain point, whatever the replacement is it might copy over that pain point.

by kccqzy

4/22/2025 at 8:44:17 PM

same here. brew’s been great historically but it’s gotten bloated and kinda slow. curious to see if sapphire can keep things lean without sacrificing compatibility.

by monoid73

4/22/2025 at 11:42:10 PM

Cool project. Definitely starring. But I’m sticking with nix to manage across systems.

Yes a steep learning curve but once you have it set up then it’s easy to sync across devices.

by xyst