Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 7.0.0. The most significant changes since 6.0.0 are faster installations and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checks and an advisory database, the end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs moving to Tier 3 (announced last year).

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d3Xt3r 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Literally just upgraded before seeing this post; I had 31 outdated packages and the first thing I saw was how blazing fast it was! I looked online to see if something changed and saw this post.

Speed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.

Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.

	▲	mikemcquaid 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Glad to hear it. A lot of time and energy has gone into performance work so glad that’s noticeable! Thanks for the kid words too <3

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mikae1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thank you for Linux Homebrew! It works so damn well.

For me the distro package manager is for system packages, Homebrew and Flatpak for the user facing apps.

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curt15 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps? Some software defies such an easy categorization. If your default install doesn't come with docker and you install docker later for development, does that make docker a user-facing app? What about language toolchains like golang, rust, npm, etc?

	▲	mikae1 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps? If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too. I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.

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LeBit 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On Linux I use mise to install CLI tools

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't understand the distinction you use here.

Then again I use versioned AppDirs on Linux since +20 years anyway, so I am not really into any arbitrary disctinction random linux distributions try to push down onto the (downstream) userbase. Besides, if you compile from source, why would you want to rely on the distribution package manager to begin with?

None of them allow for versioned AppDirs by default as far as I know; NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course), but as far as I know if you are on e. g. a debian system, you can not use it for a versioned AppDir layout.

	▲	F3nd0 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course) Also Guix, which is inspired by Nix. Don’t know about AppDir support, though. Are AppDirs more of a general concept or a formalised standard? In what capacity are you using them?
	▲	mikae1 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I don't understand the distinction you use here. Distinction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683258 I use "dnf" to upgrade my system and "flatpak update" and "brew upgrade" to upgrade the apps I've installed. An app like VirtualBox does not install using Flatpak or Homebrew, so I would use dnf for that. It's usually an app or two that doesn't work via Flatpak/Homebrew/AppImage that I need to install using dnf.

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jdorfman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Congrats and thank you to you and your team for maintaining critical infrastructure we all take for granted.

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lukeify 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know what I would do without brew on my Macs. Thank you and everyone who contributes!

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darkamaul 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Silly question - but how do you apply the cooldown to brew itself ?

I would think this is one of the most critical dependency that you would not want to get right away at let it rest for a couple of days

	▲	mikemcquaid 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can’t, by design. We instead apply if for you on upstream packages from NPM, PyPi, etc. Our model is very different to those where cooldowns exist and make sense. As-is if would just delay security updates too.

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lifty 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think at one point you said you’re working on a rust rewrite? Is that still in the cards?

	▲	mikemcquaid 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I tried it. It ended up being slower on most non-synthetic benchmarks (like repeatedly installing the same thing with warm caches). The lessons learned were instead used to make the Ruby frontend much faster.
	▲	sillywalk 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/ Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (fishshell.com) 906 points by jdxcode on Dec 28, 2024 \| hide \| past \| favorite \| 198 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217
	▲	reaperhulk 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They experimented with it but ultimately decided to focus on perf with their existing ruby codebase. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7755#issuecomment-51...

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larodi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

would you please share what amount of the new dev (work done on brew) is AI/LLM-assisted. this major version bump was very quick to arrive compared to when v6 got released?

	▲	mikemcquaid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Can’t speak for others but a lot of my work. I review it all locally first. The flow feels a lot like reviewing human PRs locally. https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/AgentIDE I actually wrote my own “Agent IDE” to make this prompt/review/push flow easier.