mikemcquaid

6 ms·

1.
by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Ultimately you don’t need to know much Ruby to maintain or contribute to Homebrew. Ruby makes it very easy to write custom DSLs that don’t feel like Ruby. I didn’t really know any before working on Homebrew and it’s now my primary language.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
We have a Landlock (formerly Bubblewrap) Linux sandbox due to an LLM. It sat unfixed on our roadmap for almost a decade. I and at least one other maintainer (as well as several LLMs) reviewed every line of code. Homebrew has never been bett
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Fixed and in 7.0.1.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Yes. If/when it doesn’t: it’s a bug and we’ll fix it. We can’t fix things people don’t report. Also: this is open source: you also could choose to fix it. Unsurprisingly the Homebrew maintainers do not spend a lot of their time uninsta
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
An LLM helped with the initial tedium of rewording 1000s of PRs from maintainer centric language into user centric language. It was reviewed and edited (by a human) probably >20 times. Go look at the PR if you don’t believe me. I used to
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Linux Homebrew users would disagree. Supporting macOS Intel has been significantly harder, slower and more expensive for us the last few years than adding ARM Linux support. If it was easy and free we’d have kept it for longer (until Apple
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
For initial installation to the default prefix someone needs to create the home directory and that person is probably root. We hope to allow all prefixes under 64 bytes in future.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
I didn’t build it. The emoji were my idea. I (and Homebrew) have used them heavily before LLMs did. Maybe LLMs loving them is my fault. Sorry if so.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
This is a bug, sorry. Working on it.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Yup! We’ve been using it for a really long time at this point. Were using Bubblewrap on Linux and moved to Landlock this release. P.S. HUGE fan of your blog and writing Simon, keep up the great work. It’s the #1 resource I recommend to anyo
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
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 thi
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
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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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
Sorry we couldn’t support this for longer :( From the release notes: > The Intel support decision reflects the limits of a volunteer-run project: Apple have dropped Intel x86_64 support from macOS 27 Golden Gate and GitHub Actions will r
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
See the release notes: we now have experimental support for using any prefix shorter than the Linux default. We are aiming to eventually fully support (Tier 1) any prefix under 64 bytes long.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
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.
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by mikemcquaid 3d ago
https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-Security-and-Supply-Chain We take supply chain security very seriously, moreso than many package managers.
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by mikemcquaid 4d ago
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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by mikemcquaid 4d ago
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 1
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Homebrew 7.0.0(brew.sh)
635 points by mikemcquaid 4d ago|253 comments
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by mikemcquaid 19d ago
As long as you have it disclose itself: feel free. We're not anti-AI use, we're just anti-low-effort AI use and don't see the need to apply effort to educate people who haven't applied the effort themselves.
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by mikemcquaid 20d ago
We do similar in Homebrew by autoclosing opens without the issue template (which implies using the API which often now implies AI). The weird flip side is that the average good AI contribution is better than the average “I used no AI” contr
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by mikemcquaid 1mo ago
Studying my 4 year BSc in Scotland: the first two years didn’t “count” to your overall grade and had more “required” modules/classes (e.g. maths for CS degrees). This had pros and cons: - it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual bui
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
See, I do think everything like "recognition/impact" needs to come back at least in part to "fun" or it's not sustainable. It's nice to think about how your work affects others! It's important, though
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
Solve problems you personally care about: “scratch your own itch”. Alternatively, to go people-first: attend meetups or conferences related to a project or technology you’re interested in.
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Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)(mikemcquaid.com)
14 points by mikemcquaid 2mo ago|7 comments
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
This has been on my mind for a while. Most OSS is done by volunteers, most volunteers need to enjoy it or it's unsustainable. "Sustainability" cannot be purely or primarily focused on money. Thoughts?
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
Unsure, no longer there. I think maybe just “contact support”.
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
I’ve used Git for 20 years now and wrote a book about it. The biggest mistake most sources make when teaching about history rewriting is omitting these two lessons first: - it’s easy to lose uncommitted data in Git and hard to lose committe
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by mikemcquaid 2mo ago
Sandbox and separate user instead of VM but sandvault is good for this and does auto install (full disclosure: have made some PRs to it). https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
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Make GitHub Actions Do More for You(mikemcquaid.com)
3 points by mikemcquaid 3mo ago|1 comments

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