They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).
Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience.
(Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)
Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity.
Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.
Here are the comparisons to other package managers:
> Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.
From 2009, so before my involvement. I'll note that this also says a bunch of things that aren't true in current-day Homebrew (Casks, for example, are distributions of .app bundles), so I think it'd be accurate to say that it doesn't reflect the project's current (or even past-decade) views.
Things improved a lot as homebrew relearned the design constraints and reasons why MacPorts made the decisions they did, and wound up adopting many of the same solutions.
It was frustrating in the beginning to see so much marketing-driven shade being thrown from an ill-informed position.
Obviously that wasn’t you or the current maintainers of homebrew, and things have improved tremendously, but that’s the era from which frustration like the grandparent post originates.
> Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.
The worst part is that MacPorts already did the same thing, but used hardlinks to avoid the kinds of problems that emerge when (for example) `realpath` resolves a symlink to an unexpected versioned directory that’s supposed to be an implementation detail.
There was a lot of FUD, dishonesty, and shallow understanding from the homebrew creators in the beginning.
> It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?
I don’t think you are being fair. This question presupposes that the supposed problems can be solved by iterative changes, rather than being inherent in the chosen design/architecture of the software, which usually requires complete replacement thereof (as well as the leadership thereof, as people who choose poor solutions to problems often can’t appreciate arguments for superior solutions).
(Not that I’m trying to suggest that I agree that homebrew in particular is bad — just speaking generally.)
People share negative sentiments for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s emotionally motivated (like venting), sometimes it’s because you want to see less hype and more realistic discourse are about the deficiencies in our industry. There simply isn’t enough time to fix all the things that are problematic or completely broken, so naturally some things are only going to be talked about, rather than worked on.
And, I’ll point out the irony in your directive: you take issue with people expressing criticism without taking action to completely resolve the respective issue, and then you come along to express criticism by tell people to not complain but instead offer up free labor, when you could go and solve the problem that resulted in the original complaint.
