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Yes, the single userness of Homebrew became obvious when I inherited a MacBook from someone which also contained some licensed software that couldn't not easily flattened and reinstalled. Homebrew sprays single-user shit all over the place and judging by google searches, there was not a clean way to remove it. I ended-up doing a lot of manual deleting. You couldn't even rf -rm /usr/local/, because Homebrew did not own that directory, my licence-locked software dropped stuff there too for example. Really how hard is it to type sudo?

And, it just seems completely idiotic to compile standard packages for the second most popular developer ABI on the planet. How many rainforests have Homebrew users burned down to get the same binaries as the guy sitting next to them?

I've been using pkgsrc lately. Binary packages that seem to work out of box and come with launchd configs. It goes into /opt/pkg/, and /opt was always better than /usr/local because of the unix philosophy that its shorter to type.

Anyway, if you like Homebrew's approach to the filesystem, there was a OS you would really like, it was called Microsoft DOS. (It didn't work out in the long run.)



> And, it just seems completely idiotic to compile standard packages for the second most popular developer ABI on the planet. How many rainforests have Homebrew users burned down to get the same binaries as the guy sitting next to them?

I find 90% of the brew things I install are binaries (they call them "bottles"), and I don't even use brew in /usr/local (where even more binaries are available). Have you used brew recently or is your experience from some time ago?


Well, there's also gentoo ;)




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