mhoyeWell, I’m back on MacOS for a bit, everyone’s favourite Unix made of nerf. Is MacPorts still a thing, or is everyone on team homebrew and still recompiling stuff for every install/upgrade?
Matthew@mhoye Recently switched from Brew to Nix. Can recommend Nix.
@mcg I thought Nix was basically “declarative apt”, a way of normalizing fleets of Linux machines against a shared spec; I didn’t realize you could use that model on MacOS (or across nixen?) at all. What should I read?
@mhoye It’s a declarative package manager and full distro. It officially supports macOS and the install docs will walk you through an install. Probably slightly out of date now, but might be a good starting point, https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/macos-nix-setup/ I use Home-Manager along with Nix to have a more portable setup, You can also do things like… open this shell with this set of tools installed, when the shell closes, the tools are gone. Can replace tools like rbenv/virtenv, etc…
MacOS Nix Setup (an alternative to Homebrew)
I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and why not Homebrew or MacPorts?) The short answer: hype.
@mcg Thank you, I'll give that a look. MacPorts seems to be more and more the fringe position, despite the better fundamentals. Nix is interesting, though, and looks promising?
@mhoye It looks promising to me. It does have a steep learning curve, compared to Brew/Ports.