which makes startup slow, and is also doing this too-clever-by-half thing of trying to work out which packages I actually wanted to install and which just came along for the ride as dependencies. Now it insists on automatically refreshing the package index every.

(I don’t know if Max Howell explicitly realized that keeping a package manager up to date with new versions of packages would be something a whole user community could do together if it were made easy enough, or if it just happened to work out like that, but in any case it did work very well in practice.)

Homebrew in its early days was good because it was lightweight, fast (for (as it was then) a package manager that could only build from source, at least), didn’t try to do stuff that was too clever, and also acquired a fairly nice and large package library fairly quickly thanks, I think, to a relaxed contribution policy that didn’t require individuals to take complete responsibility for packages. It feels like with this and other changes made over the last few years, Homebrew is coming close to falling off the back of the package manager treadmill.

Homebrew python