How Homebrew Became Mac's Package Manager with Mike McQuaid
Mike McQuaid, Project Leader of Homebrew, joins Corey Quinn to share how a package manager conceived in a London pub became essential for 10 million Mac users. Homebrew lets you install software with one command instead of downloading files and clicking through installers, maintained by just 30 people who each get $300 a month.
Mike shares the origin story from a drunken conversation about package management, explains how Homebrew Bundle can set up a new Mac with one command, and why Homebrew refuses to package software with fake open source licenses like Terraform's new versions.
Show Highlights:
(01:44) Why Homebrew Works on Linux
(04:02) The Curl Bash Security Problem
(05:02) Homebrew Was Conceived in a London Pub
(06:42) Apps That Auto-Update Four Times a Day
(08:43) Brew Bundle
(14:00) Why Homebrew Auto-Updates Itself
(18:18) Homebrew Maintainers Get $300 a Month
(22:19) The Brew Doctor Command
(29:10) Why Homebrew Doesn't Package Fake Open Source
(32:05) Open Source Is Not a Career
(35:27) When Someone Blamed Homebrew for Breaking Their Business
(37:39) Auto-Update Options for Homebrew
(39:40) Where to Find Mike
Links:
Website: https://mikemcquaid.com
Homebrew: https://brew.sh
GitHub: https://github.com/homebrew
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid
Homebrew is a widely used package manager that simplifies the installation of open-source software on macOS. It was created in response to the growing demand for a lightweight, developer-friendly tool suited to an increasingly Mac-centric development ecosystem. Today, Homebrew is a near-essential part of the macOS software development toolkit.
Mike McQuaid joined the project early on and collaborated closely with its creator, Max Howell. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss Homebrew’s origins, architecture, its emphasis on automation and CI/CD, long-term sustainability, controversial trade-offs, and much more.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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The post Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
There will be bleeps (Friends)
Mike McQuaid and Justin Searls join Jerod in the wake of the RubyGems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money in open source, what sustainability really means for our community, making a career out of open source (or not), and more. Bleep!
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Featuring:
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Justin Searls – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Breaking Change podcast
Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event
Ruby Central’s “security measures” leave front door wide open
nayafia/lemonade-stand
The transition of rubygems repository ownership
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Brewing up something for work (Friends)
Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew, and now CTO at Workbrew joins us to discuss open tabs, social media spam and distractions, TikTok’s addictive nature, Apple Vision Pro and its potential future, the maintenance of software, the swing back to old school web development, the value of telemetry in open source projects, Mike’s ongoing involvement in Homebrew and what they’re working on at Workbrew, Homebrew’s relationship with Apple, the importance of developer experience, and sooo much more.
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Featuring:
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Spam attack on Twitter/X rival Mastodon highlights ‘fediverse’ vulnerabilities
brew.sh
Workbrew.com
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Reactions to Apple’s new vision (Friends)
Homebrew project leader Mike McQuaid joins us to weigh in on Apple’s big Vision Pro announcement. We also hit on our favorite (and least favorite) non-AR things from the WWDC 2023 keynote.
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Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
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Featuring:
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Apple’s official Vision Pro page
Sarah Dietschy: I Tried the Apple Vision Pro 👀
The Verge: Apple Vision Pro first look
Valve Index
WWDC Highlights
Apple sure kicked Meta’s butt today, right?
CmdrTaco on the iPod
Day One
Aaron Levie’s tweet
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Homebrew! Part Deux (Interview)
We’re talking with Mike McQuaid about Homebew 2.0.0, supporting Linux and Windows 10, the backstory and details surrounding the security issue they had in 2018, their new governance model, Mike’s new role, the core team meeting in-person at FOSDEM this year, and what’s coming next for Homebrew.
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Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Featuring:
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Homebrew on HackerOne
brew.sh
Donate Homebrew on Patreon
Here’s how Eric Holmes gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes
adamstac/laptop
thoughtbot/laptop
MikeMcQuaid/strap - Bootstrap your macOS development system
Homebrew governance
Homebrew formulae analytics
“This is why people don’t contribute to your open source project” —Mike McQuaid
Hot Shots! Part Deux - starring Charlie Sheen
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
ANTHOLOGY — The Future of Open Source at OSCON 2017 (Interview)
This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).
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Featuring:
Kelsey Hightower – GitHub, X
Safia Abdalla – Website, GitHub, X
Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is an OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate (Google Cloud Platform) — We talked about being a co-chair, why he does live demos, and his motivations towards open source.
When you say you’re successful, I guarantee when you look around it’s because someone is celebrating your victories.
Check out DevOps Days Austin 2017 on YouTube
The tweets mentioned from Kelsey that were seen as “controversial by some in the community” started with this tweet, then this tweet, and finally this tweet.
“I don’t write code for free. I write code for freedom.”
“Best birthday gift ever!” thanks to Brian Ketelsen
Safia Abdalla
Safia Abdalla is an open source developer and creator of Zarf — We talked about being a command-line junkie and her talk on the intersection of business and open source.
Zarf - an online platform that allows writers to sell subscription content to their readers.
captainsafia/legit
captainsafia/goopshttps
captainsafia/commentator
captainsafia/checklist
Brief
captainsafia/giddy
captainsafia/fony
Open Source at Facebook with James Pearce (Facebook)
Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal
Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal work at GitHub in Open Source Programs — We talked about GitHub’s Open Source Alley at OSCON and how they are working to better support open source maintainers and their communities.
dear-github/dear-github
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Homebrew and package management (Interview)
Mike McQuaid joined us to catch us up on the latest in Homebrew and the recent 1.0.0 release. We talked about no more /usr/local — Homebrew moves to /usr/local/Homebrew to keep /usr/local cleaner, auto-updates, the growth of the Homebrew community and how it has grown to almost 6000 unique contributors, and more.
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Featuring:
Mike McQuaid – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Homebrew 1.0.0!
The Changelog #35: Homebrew with Max Howell
Homebrew — The missing package manager for macOS
Homebrew on GitHub
Homebrew/brew on GitHub
Contributors to Homebrew/brew
Homebrew Discourse
Welcome – Gentoo Linux
KDE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Qt | Cross-platform software development for embedded & desktop
Software Freedom Conservancy Welcomes Homebrew as a Member Project
Linuxbrew
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
