Really informative read, I agree that Homebrew’s naming conventions can be frustrating at times, but overall it’s such a great tool.
I hadn’t realized it was this simple to spin up your own tap for distributing tools. How does this compare to using language specific tools (like uv, for example)? Is it better because that’s easier for folks not within the ecosystem ?
To answer your question, other tools with package registries typically require accounts, increasingly 2FA, often encourage some sort of signing step. Having GitHub's ToS serve as the source of trust really simplifies things for the Homebrew team
while it's lightweight, shipping the kitchen sink (uv) is a no-go
so, it's a venv, with the pinned dependencies installed [0], a random example of how this looks like, here [1]
(specifically for uv; i tried to get `brew update-python-resources` and `homebrew-pypi-poet` working for a "private" package, it didn't really work; so i went ahead and created uvbrew [2] instead to help with the resource generation)
A small tip for Go folk: the Goreleaser tool makes it very easy to manage your formulae, at least for distributing binaries (allowed in personal taps but a no-no in core)
IMO it might be more ideal to do the updates from the tap side, similar to how upstream does it. This workflow[1] allows you handle updates even for formulae/casks you do not own. Using the `brew bump` command, you scan all formulae/casks and create PRs that update them. In these PRs[2], you can use the `brew test-bot` command to ensure the updates are tested working.
This is a good idea. I'm so used to being miserly about my action minute allotment that this didn't occur to me until I realized that OSS time is free still (I think?)
Fun fact about packaging Python tools: It turns out that there are Python packages that aren't compatible with Homebrew due to cycles in build dependencies. While this is no problem for pip, as it just downloads binary releases, Homebrew builds ALL of the dependencies from scratch. And yeah, that also means that modestly sized Python projects may take over an hour to build the "bottle".
I switched to nix to manage my systems and haven’t looked back. The only thing lacking is a single dependency on shitty windows for multiplayer gaming.
There was actually an episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast released only a few days after this post that touched on much of the same stuff:
https://topenddevs.com/podcasts/ruby-rogues/episodes/distrib...
Really informative read, I agree that Homebrew’s naming conventions can be frustrating at times, but overall it’s such a great tool.
I hadn’t realized it was this simple to spin up your own tap for distributing tools. How does this compare to using language specific tools (like uv, for example)? Is it better because that’s easier for folks not within the ecosystem ?
Thanks!
To answer your question, other tools with package registries typically require accounts, increasingly 2FA, often encourage some sort of signing step. Having GitHub's ToS serve as the source of trust really simplifies things for the Homebrew team
specifically for python packages,
while it's lightweight, shipping the kitchen sink (uv) is a no-go
so, it's a venv, with the pinned dependencies installed [0], a random example of how this looks like, here [1]
(specifically for uv; i tried to get `brew update-python-resources` and `homebrew-pypi-poet` working for a "private" package, it didn't really work; so i went ahead and created uvbrew [2] instead to help with the resource generation)
[0]: https://docs.brew.sh/Python-for-Formula-Authors [1]: https://github.com/hynek/homebrew-tap/blob/main/Formula/doc2... [2]: https://github.com/thewisenerd/uvbrew
that said, it's _really_ easy to have executables against random sdist with `uv run --with`.
here's something that i was writing just yesterday:
Now stick the wrapper in a git repo, get Renovate to bump the version numbers, automagic release on new version, and have Brew install the wrapper.
A small tip for Go folk: the Goreleaser tool makes it very easy to manage your formulae, at least for distributing binaries (allowed in personal taps but a no-no in core)
I didn't know this until recently, but it now supports multiple languages.
"First-class support for Go, Rust, TypeScript, Python, and Zig projects."
I wrote my own version of the homebrew tap bumping workflow for GitHub Actions: https://github.com/wyattjoh/homebrew-bump-revision I use it for some of my personal projects
Nice! I was too lazy but looks good
IMO it might be more ideal to do the updates from the tap side, similar to how upstream does it. This workflow[1] allows you handle updates even for formulae/casks you do not own. Using the `brew bump` command, you scan all formulae/casks and create PRs that update them. In these PRs[2], you can use the `brew test-bot` command to ensure the updates are tested working.
[1]: https://github.com/loozhengyuan/homebrew-tap/blob/main/.gith...
[2]: https://github.com/loozhengyuan/homebrew-tap/pull/11
This is a good idea. I'm so used to being miserly about my action minute allotment that this didn't occur to me until I realized that OSS time is free still (I think?)
Fun fact about packaging Python tools: It turns out that there are Python packages that aren't compatible with Homebrew due to cycles in build dependencies. While this is no problem for pip, as it just downloads binary releases, Homebrew builds ALL of the dependencies from scratch. And yeah, that also means that modestly sized Python projects may take over an hour to build the "bottle".
I switched to nix to manage my systems and haven’t looked back. The only thing lacking is a single dependency on shitty windows for multiplayer gaming.