As a former Linux user, I’m getting really, really, really burnt by homebrew.

My big fallacy is that I was used to having the package manager handle everything for me.

Brew doesn’t do that. Oh my, it certainly does not!

First crack: Brew cask

I don’t know if brew cask is bad or if it’s just getting the short end of the stick, but several months ago the brew developers decided to move the “Caskroom” to /usr/local/Caskroom

Or in fact, they decided I should move it.

Which I tried and failed at.

I seriously doubt there is any Linux package manager that would ever, ever do that.

If something needs to be done… IT. DOES. IT. FOR. YOU.™

So that was a very new and original concept.

Then a little later the “non-casked” brew stopped working with the perpetual “Already up-to-date.”-message.

This was months ago!

Now I’m a person that likes to have stuff upgraded. I feel that being upgraded and having virus protection are the two first things you do to protect yourself.

Guess how many times I was planning to kill brew forever?

It turns out, some one had crapped in the blue cupboard and broken the whole brew repository (every programmer has to start somewhere – especially open source programmers…), so you had to paste some hard core git commands to get things up and running again.

This solution appeared about a month ago (20th August).

My brew has been broken for at least 4 months.

Blazing speed….

The big problem with brew is the reliance on git… or how that reliance is apparently badly implemented.

On the other hand, git wasn’t exactly implemented to solve this kind of problem. (No git is not a package manager or a CM-tool, it is a versioning system – I don’t care if you have 30 km of reasons why it can solve everything from Rubik’s Cube to world hunger to software configuration and installation!)

Now that I know OS X better I’ve come to understand that brew cask should never have been implemented in the first place. It replaces functionality that performs magnitudes better than brew and it does this drop dead simple.

Remember the old days when hard drives boasted a whopping 10 MB of memory and there were floppy disks?

No?

Congrats!

I remember my excitement when we switched from 360 kB floppy disks to 1.44 MB hard floppies! Heck, I remember my even bigger excitement when we switched from cassettes to floppy disks before that.

The Windows, Linux etc approach to program installs – that you spread the program all over the place and only place a single version of a file on the computer once in a shared space – it is an archeological artifact from these times. When disk space was expensive and you had to be frugal.

What OS X does with its program’s files is, it places them all, “DLL:s”, executables and every other resource, in one folder per program, called the program’s application-folder. (Because it’s a folder in the folder named “Applications”).

If someone else happens to use the same binaries/resources/whatchamacallit, they package it in their app-folder (no filthy, disgusting, pathogen transmitting sharing!) No dependencies outside the folder, no DLL-hell, version mess, suicidal-programmer’s-excuse-to-kick-the-bucket!

And most importantly of all… it doesn’t matter that it takes an extra megabyte or even a hundred, no one cares because we all have 500 gigabytes, even terabyte disks!

SIZE. DOES. NOT. MATTER. ANYMORE.

So, no. brew cask was a total bust and a waste and a complete STD I can’t get off my mac now. (yeah yeah yeah you went there too when I talked about size, animal!)

The other brew? (The non-cask one?)

Well I have like three console apps I’d like to have around… joe, markdown, um and what was it… unrar? Naaah… well it was something anyway. Ah yes, python! (Hey, doesn’t OS X have a native version of python? perhaps not… whatever!)

Anyway, I guess it does fill some purpose…

I wonder if I can remove the shit and just install the three things I want installed like that and keep things really, really, really minimalistic over there….

Because you know… yesterday’s weather!

Don’t know what “yesterday’s weather” means?

It means, if you were to guess tomorrow’s weather, a good guess would be that it would be about the same as yesterday’s weather.

Ergo, brew will break again, and I will sit there like a UFO with no online resources that can help me. (It also seems the brew people are really, really, really bad at SEO… you can’t find shit when searching for brew related info…)

Nah, I’ve come to the conclusion that brew might be less about beer and more about witches…

All I need to do now is to stay as un-Macbethish as I possibly can!

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Featured image: By Magnus Gertkemper, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, Link