Are there any downsides to using Homebrew as a package manager on Linux?
I'm especially concerned about it being somehow broken, unwieldy, insecure or privacy-invasive.
Case in point; at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser. Out of the available options I gravitate towards Brave as it seems like the least bad out of the bunch.
Unfortunately, their RPM-package leaves a lot to be desired and has multiple times just been awful to deal with. So much so that I have been using another Chromium-based browser instead that's available directly from my distro's repos. But..., I would still switch to Brave in an instant if Brave was found in my distro's repos. A quick search on repology.org reveals that an up-to-date Brave is packaged in the AUR (unsurprisingly), Manjaro and Homebrew. I don't feel like changing distros for the sake of a single program, but adding Homebrew to my arsenal of universal package managers doesn't sound that bad. But, not all universal package managers are created equal, therefore I was interested to know how Homebrew fares compared to the others and if it handles the packaging of the browser without blemishing the capabilities of the browser's sandbox.
P.S. I expect people to recommend me Distrobox instead. Don't worry, I have been a staunch user of Distrobox for quite a while now. I have also run Brave through an Arch-distrobox in the past. But due to some concerns I've had, I chose to discontinue this. Btw, its Flatpak package ain't bad either. But unfortunately it's not official, so I choose to not make use of it for that reason.
Nix is definitely cool and I already have it installed on my system. Unfortunately, even Nix has trouble with keeping Brave up-to-date at all times. It's still on 1.59.120, while Brave has had three releases since. It took about 3 days after the release of version 1.59.120 for them to release it on their repos. As you can see, it leaves a lot to desire.
It's a community maintained repo. The possibility of updating it yourself is possible. The master branch is updated to the 1.59.124, which came out a week ago. And was updated around the same time. 1.60.110 was just released 1 day ago. You can update it yourself. After all, it's supposed to give you a great default state to fall back to, not keep you on the bleeding edge of releases.
Edir: how to do it yourself and contribute to the community. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Update_a_package
Brain fart on my side, thanks for correcting me so respectfully 😊!
Hmm.., maintaining it myself is an interesting thought. Perhaps I should take a look at that, thanks a lot for your input. Much appreciated!
Minor version bumps should be mostly trivial: Change version and hash, package that into commit+PR (ckeck guidelines on that!) and that's it most of the time.
The harder part is QA; ensuring it still works as expected. Therefore, even just testing update PRs as they come in would be a great help.
If the code change is trivial and a user of the package said it still works for them, a commiter coming along is likely convinced of the PR's quality and just merges it.
It's super easy to contribute to Nixpkgs in a meaningful manner :)