librelist archives

Re: [homebrew] Calling all emacs hackers...

From:

Peter Aronoff

Date:

2011-04-05 @ 14:26

On Tue Apr 06 2011 @  8:40, George Kulakowski wrote:
> As far as system duplicates go, why not also zsh? The difference in
> functionality between the system zsh and Homebrew's is minuscule
> compared to the difference between Emacs head and 22.1. Also, using
> Homebrew's zsh as a login shell requires manually altering a file as
> root, which doesn't exactly fit with the ethos of Homebrew.

And then we are back to Bash again for the same reasons (see for example
the discussion here - https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/2438).

More than once I've seen Max say that Homebrew doesn't try to be all things
to all people and also that it was originally meant to simply add only "a
few packages" to a basic system. On the other hand, it now has a huge
userbase among people who develop on Macs, and (from what I can tell) many
of those people use Homebrew as their primary (only?) package manager for
more than a few packages at a time. 

Here are some pros and cons of duplication as I see them:

Pros:
    * Some things exist in very different versions from the version Apple
      ships with (Vim, for example - or how about Git?).
    * In some cases a newer version of package B is required to build
      package A. I think that curl and couchdb is a case of this.
    * A lot of users want them.
    * There is nothing inherently evil or bad about editing a system file
      with root permissions. The permissions are a perfectly normal part
      of *nix systems.
    * The formulas in homebrew-alt are now very much second-class citizens.
      You can't straightforwardly track or update things you install from
      there using `brew` itself.
Cons:
    * There is the no-duplicate rule.
    * Someone might conceivably edit /etc/shells in such a way that he is
      later locked out of his system. He might then blame Homebrew. (I
      think this is a bad argument, but it came up in the Bash thread, so
      I'm mentioning it here.)
    * Maintaining duplicates is more work for the maintainers, especially
      in a case like Emacs which is apparently buggy with Lion.

If I ran the world, I would rather see Homebrew open up to *more*
duplicates, because I think the pros outweigh the cons. Either way though,
I think something should be done/adjusted/set in stone. The current policy
is all over the place, and that leads to confusion and frustration for
users.

Anyhow, that's my rant. Back to work for me.
    
Thanks, Peter
-- 
If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late.

On Tuesday, 5 April 2011 at 15:26, Peter Aronoff wrote:
> If I ran the world, I would rather see Homebrew open up to *more*
> duplicates, because I think the pros outweigh the cons. Either way though,
> I think something should be done/adjusted/set in stone. The current policy
> is all over the place, and that leads to confusion and frustration for
> users.
No. The current policy is flexible because it's more important to be 
useful than consistent. Programmers care far more about consistency than 
most normal people (I include myself here in not being normal). We can't 
just remove heavily-used duplicates until we have a migration path for the
users using them.

It leads to some aggravation in the minority who insist on consistency. No
matter what we do we will aggravate some people and I don't believe in 
changing Max's good design simply because some people don't like it.

-- 
Mike McQuaid
http://mikemcquaid.comSent with Sparrow