> I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update
replyI definitely have thought something along those lines (mostly when I go to install a small tool, and get hit with 20 minutes of auto-updates first).
Pretty sure I also will not be adopting this particular solution, however
I've never thought "only 2 seconds faster" - I've certainly thought "why is this taking half the time it takes Gentoo to recompile an entire server".
replyI'm not sure if I just have way fewer things installed than most people or I just update more often, but I haven't experienced anything like this for years. I run `brew upgrade` probably around once every (work)day, usually right before doing a git pull or something, and then I'll quickly look at a couple emails or slack messages, and then it's always done by the time I switch back
replyBut you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.
replyI agree it’s annoying, but I haven’t turned it off because it’s only annoying because I’m not keeping my computer (brew packages) up-to-date normally (aka, it’s my own fault).
I'd be much happier if it were on a background job, than arbitrarily running when I invoke a command
replyTerrible default behavior is a great reason to abandon a software package.
replyFWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving
replyI've been a lightweight homebrew user for many, many, many years now. I just use it to download or update a thing I need, once every 3-6mo.
replyIt constantly blows my mind how insanely long it takes just to do a few simple things on the fastest hardware I've ever owned in my life.
If you use the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin, running `brew` against the generated brewfile becomes the slowest part of a `darwin-rebuild switch` by far. In the fast cases, it turns something that could take 1 second into something that takes 10, which is definitely annoying when running that command is part of your process for configuration changes even when you don't update anything. Homebrew no-ops against an unchanging Brewfile are really slow.
replyBrew definitely used to be a lot slower, and I used to find it very tedious. I feel like they've done a reasonably good job in improving that over the years though (with the switch to distributing binaries by default being a huge win in terms of speed). I have to wonder if stuff like this is more due to lingering feelings from before combined with the easy access to vibe coding tools. If LLM coding came a few years earlier, maybe projects like this one would have made more sense to me.
replyAgreed here. The speed bottleneck I run into is simply that there's often a lot of packages that need updating, so there's a lot to download. And if anything needs to be compiled from source then the time that takes will dominate (though I think everything I currently run is thankfully pre-built)
replyThe same criticism has been said of Deno and Pnpm and bun, and yet, despite all these years since their respective releases, node and npm remain slower than all three options.
replyYeah, but do they work? Last time I gave bun a chance their runtime had serious issues with frequent crashes. Faster package installation or spin-up time is meaningless if it comes at the cost of stability and compatibility.
replybun is my go to for npm packages; it’s so much better and faster than npm, it’s not funny.
replyNever had any issues.
Well, pnpm solves the storage issue, which is a more pressing reason to use it. (I don't know about deno/bun)
replyIf I have to deal with even the mention of another package manager in the cross-platform dev ecosystem I am going to snap
replyHorses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!
replyEdit: no, it won't...
Agreed on horses for courses. Different people have different tolerances. And yea, all things being equal, faster is better, but they are almost never equal. If you don’t mind me asking, what does “too slow” mean for you in this context? Do you have a particularly complex setup? And what do you use now as an alternative and how has that impacted the update speed?
replyI wish I could remember the details -- I know I got annoyed with things being slow and when I got a new computer decided to go the no-homebrew route. I'm using nix, and it seems fine so far, but I also really don't understand it at all, which is a little concerning. :-)
replyMy brew update/upgrade takes forever
replyI've wanted brew to be faster. It would be a nice QoL for me.
replySee also: asdf and mise
replyhttps://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-2365...
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