Homebrew is an awful system, it's the exact opposite of what should be held up as an example of a well engineered "packaging system". It's not even a proper package management system anyway, and there are far, far better systems for Mac OS X. The whole "dump everything into /usr/local" is absolutely insane, and it's depressing that the development community on OS X has fallen for it.
And yet it’s by far the most popular, easiest to use, and solves the most number of problems for the most number of people. Millions of hours of saved dev time over the years. That’s well engineered to me - engineered for users, not purity.
While many people would agree that value to users is more important than "pure" engineering/code quality, moving the goalposts doesn't nullify the GP's point. If Google was hiring to acquire Homebrew (assuming it was possible) then value to users would be a factor to consider. But if they were just hiring the person to work on non-homebrew projects, why wouldn't "pure" engineering quality be relevant?
Do the projects at Google not also have to provide value to people? Given the number of products they kill, you’d think that would be a higher priority.
In the decade or so that I’ve used it, it’s pretty much always done exactly what I’ve needed it to with no negative side effects. What else am I supposed to want out of it?
Homebrew on Apple Silicon is finally at /opt/homebrew instead.
One not very sane decision tho is choosing to not require sudo for package installations but have /usr/local or /opt/homebrew writable for more than just root.
It's OK-good. 95% of the time it just works. One thing I would love is a feature like AppCleaner to know where was dependencies were installed before they are removed. Maybe it's already capable of but I didn't know how.
