When I used to use brew, most of the time was brew doing housekeeping. You could see the title bar change processes twenty times a second, often ruby, as it did whatever it was doing, even for simple commands like search or before upgrade confirmation is approved.
Sorry if this is obvious, but when I do `brew install sassafras`, the bulk of the time between hitting enter and being able to run sassafras is downloading and installing. The overhead of Homebrew seems very minimal. Is the slowness coming from a side of Homebrew that maybe I don't see very often?
For someone whose needs are generally met with homebrew, what are its major issues (aside from speed)?
- Doesn't allow installing multiple versions of packages at the same time
- In practice, requires being installed to /usr/local
- Hard to uninstall in practice, leaves files scattered behind
99% of the time I spend running “brew” is downloading time, so I honestly don’t get this question. What kind of Internet connection do you have?
Brew is just fine as it is, unless you’re running an older version of macOS and it has to build packages from source.
When I used to use brew, most of the time was brew doing housekeeping. You could see the title bar change processes twenty times a second, often ruby, as it did whatever it was doing, even for simple commands like search or before upgrade confirmation is approved.
You can disable that; I agree it’s annoying but it keeps from having to deal with accumulated updates at some random inconvenient future time.
export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP=1
I have been using pksrc on my macs for years. Also works on Apple Silicon.
https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/
Macports might be worth considering
https://www.macports.org/
Nix
This, save a few very specific Mac things (MacVim install works better with home brew for me) using Nix and home manager on Mac has been a dream setup
I see two people mentioning speed - is Homebrew doing something inefficient?
What’s wrong with home brew?
Bulky and slow
Sorry if this is obvious, but when I do `brew install sassafras`, the bulk of the time between hitting enter and being able to run sassafras is downloading and installing. The overhead of Homebrew seems very minimal. Is the slowness coming from a side of Homebrew that maybe I don't see very often?
uv
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