Brew is a steaming shitpile
I've long hated brew / homebrew, as you could likely guess from the title of this post.First the basic reasons:
- It's slow like a snail that got run over and only moves because it is slowly oozing down an incline
- It doesn't sanely support older MacOS versions
- It updates the whole fucking planet of packages even when you are just installing one damned thing
- The configuration files are not config files, they are goddamn actual ruby code
- It doesn't provide an efficient query system for its own "database"
- It has no fucking database
- It's shit.
- Really stinky annoying shit
- The developer of it thinks he is the shit and got pissed when not "adequately appreciated fot it".
- It's a spectacularly overengineered pile of gooey rotting pus slowly leaking out of a dumpster fire.
I hate it. I hate it supremely. I hate it so fucking much that I wrote my own fucking entire replacement for it's scripts called minibrew that uses it's same remote data but does not using any of the horrible code it actually ships. And that works better, because of course it does.
All of this isn't even what triggered me to write this. Oh no. I've hated this pile of garbage for over a decade and I was still continue to only shit on brew ocasionally. I need to take an extra large dump on it now.
Why?
Because I feel the need.
Why?
Well you see, I saw a YouTube video I wanted to shit on. The video is long. The YouTube interface doesn't provide any reasonable way I see to grab the subtitles to a video so I can critique a bad video line by line.
Enter me wanting to use yt-dlp. The machine I want to use to write up my critique? An older machine running an older version of MacOS, which I cannot actually update. Brew has phased it out, because brew only works halfway okay on the latest 3 major versions of MacOS at most.
My MacOS on this particular machine? Older than that.
What happens when you want to install something from brew from an older machine like this?
This:
- It wants to update all packages even though I don't want to touch any packages besides just installing yt-dlp. This is just the way brew works normally. Normally as in it is normally idiotic.
- Because it's an older machine it wants to install everything from source. Why? Because they don't maintain the links to the old binary package. Not those packages can't be downloaded. They can. They still exist on the download system. They just won't give you the metadata to download them. So it builds everything from source. This takes 10 and a half ages. On my machine? Over an hour to download, build, and install the random crap it wants to install to install the one package I want.
Or at least I let it run for over an hour last time I tried. Eventually I said "fuck this" and installed yt-dlp on a different modern Mac just to get the subtitles and then copy them over to this machine.
I'm letting it run again. Who knows how many hours and how much crap it will install to my machine just to get yt-dlp to install.
You may be thinking "lol fucking loser just get a modern Mac then". No? I already fucking have a current modern m4 mac. I also have 3 others macs I use for various things. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to use all of them reasonably well. Being only to use the newest one because brew is a pile of garbage is not acceptable.
Fuck you brew. Fuck you very much.
Brew is right up there with:
- Ancient enemies
- Thorns stuck in my foot
- Malfunctioning printers
- Taking a furniture corner to my funny bone after banging my shin on a different corner
- Accidentally drinking milk gone sour
- Realizing there is a chunk in the mouthful I'm actively swallowing
- Throwing up afterwards
- Bursting a blood vessel in my brain from the horrible experience and dying
- Discovering I'm in hell because of course I am
- Discovering that the manager of hell is a clone of brew
- Finding a notebook written in blood remarking that I was destined for heaven but a ruby code glitch resulted in hell
The only thing worse than brew on MacOS is learning that anyone on planet uses it on Linux.
It's like discovering that some people prefer eating cow dung to a perfectly cooked burger. Actually, that might make more sense. At least if by "eating" they mean having it shoved up their rear ends to diversify their ecosystem.
But of course, I only have warm fuzzy thoughts towards the dear and amazing author of brew. Incidentally, I'm also selling bridges. This is my way of showing my love and appreciation.
By the way, it's still busily doing something. Destroying my SSD most likely.