Comment by eikenberry
3 days ago
Does anyone know of a good comparison of the process to add a package to the system? I've used multiples of these sorts of user-land package managers and always find tools that aren't in the repositories that I have to install manually. It'd be great to just add these tools to an existing package manager but I've never seen this aspect of these package managers compared.
Comparison of which managers?
Adding package to homebrew is straightforward, except that it has a lot of (reasonable?) requirements to make it right. Basically, you make a PR with a "formula" to their main repo from your branch. Formulas are ruby programs. LLM can do it easily, and such code is accepted if correct.
Homebrew, mise, flox, devenv are the first ones I can think of.. Arch Linux's AURs get an honorary mention as they are used in the similar way on that distro and Arch + distrobox gets the same results. A quick search shows there are many others but it doesn't look like a comparison exists for this area and I'm getting OK results out of AI comparisons. I'll just dig into it that way.
I think homebrew is different in comparison to flox,mise and devenv. Later are for reproducible dev envs, former is for installing tools globally where you cannot/do not want traditional package managers or building from source.