>> except that Apple doesn't have a package manager > This is false. Homebrew is no different from any other open source package manager.

Just to quote the literal slogan of homebrew:

>The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)

I think it is fair to say that Apple does in fact not have a package manager. Unless they do bundle homebrew with their OS nowadays?

> Apple the corporation doesn’t have a package manager. > MacOS, the ecosystem does. > No different from Linux. There is no Linux package manager. There are numerous open source package managers for Linux.

macOS the OS has a package manager in terms of a tool to install packages. It does not have the ability to find/download packages to install though.

In the sense of a package manager being able to download and install additional software, macOS has several choices available but none of them are included with the OS, or have the ability to update the OS.

There is arguably no single "Linux ecosystem". There are numerous Linux-based distributions, which are largely comparable to macOS as an OS. One of the very key differences between each family of distro's is the package manager the OS ships with by default and uses to update itself.

So no. macOS does not "have" a package manager that's comparable to those included by default with linux distributions, but there are several third party package managers available for it.

> Another false statement. Homebrew is just as capable of searching as any Linux package manager.

I wasn't talking about homebrew.

It helps if you understand the comment before you reply to it and make accusations.

Edit to add, because fuck the HN timeouts. Heaven forbid someone make 6 comments in two fucking hours:

Try reading the whole fucking comment again, with the points being made really hammered home for you:

> macOS the OS has a package manager in terms of a tool to install packages. It does not have the ability to find/download packages to install though.

This is about the built in macOS package manager, that the OS itself uses to install packages. It's invoked via `installer` on the command line, or Installer.app in the GUI. It does not expose the ability to find/fetch packages from remote URLs.

> In the sense of a package manager being able to download and install additional software, macOS has several choices available but none of them are included with the OS, or have the ability to update the OS.

This is referring to homebrew, macports, etc.

We certainly do see things differently, because only one of us is repeatedly calling the other a liar due to poor reading comprehension.

If you don’t include homebrew, as a package manager for MacOS, then you aren’t having a serious conversation.

This whole line of conversation is about whether it’s necessary to manually install python.

If you claim it is you are lying, because it can easily be installed via homebrew, and you are clearly aware of that.

If you have some need to claim that homebrew isn’t a MacOS package manager or that MacOS doesn’t “have” homebrew, because Apple doesn’t ship it. Go right ahead, but it’s a red herring.

MacOS the thing that comes preinstalled when you buy a computer from Apple doesn’t have a package manager. You have to install one yourself, manually.

By that logic MacOS doesn’t have any third party software at all.

No, it means that macOS and its third party software aren't one in the same thing.

Is faker.js a macOS vulnerability because there were people using Macs who installed npm and then installed faker.js? This isn't a theoretical question—whenever you install something, you need to consider where it's coming from and whether they can be trusted.

MacOS has third party software.

MacOS has homebrew as an open source package manager.

It has a third party package manager, yes. I'm pretty sure your parent meant that there isn't a first party one.

On Debian, packages in the official repositories are considered to be literally part of the Debian project. The maintainers are considered Debian maintainers, and bugs go into the Debian bug tracker.

This matters due to the trust issues I alluded to above. It also means that on Debian, there is one definitive version of Python (or at least one per Python version). The Homebrew, MacPorts, and Python.org Python binaries are all slightly different, such that it's possible for software to work with one but not the other.

No two Linux package managers are identical either, and not all Linux distributions work like Debian. Debian is a collection of volunteers. The choice to trust it is no different to the choice to trust Homebrew. Considering the package manager to be part of Debian doesn’t change this.

However none of this has any relevance to the claim in question, which is that python must be installed manually.

MacOS certainly has a package manager that can install and maintain python.

Except that most other open source package managers strive to be good at what they do.

Brew has a long history of treating any criticism of their truly woeful approach to security, dependency management etc, with "well fuck you we dont want to hear your opinion".

There were other better macOS package managers before it; macports was sort of even Apple sponsored.

Everyone switched to brew even though it was the most poorly designed because it came from the Rails hype era where everyone wanted all their tools to be written in Ruby and didn’t care about anything else.

I used and still use macports, but there were valid reasons to switch to homebrew: macports did not have precompiled packages, did not use system libraries, and machines were not as powerful as they are now.

This meant if you wanted to install, say, ImageMagick, you would spend one day compiling stuff.

Also contributing a brew recipe was (and probably still is) easier than contributing to macports, and brew casks are pretty convenient.

I deeply dislike some of the choices of homebrew, but I can understand why it was popular, and it wasn't just because of the ruby hype.

Yeah no kidding.