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.

Homebrew project lead, Mike McQuaid:

Today, I’d like to announce Homebrew 4.0.0. The most significant change since 3.6.0 enables significantly faster Homebrew-maintained tap updates by migrating from Git-cloned taps to JSON downloads.

Mike McQuaid:

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!

And a quick note on the Apple Silicon support:

Homebrew doesn’t (yet) provide bottles for all packages on Apple Silicon that we do on Intel x86_64 but we welcome your help in doing so.

I’d be surprised if this undertaking could be described as anything less than large. Congrats to Mike and the entire team! Homebrew is a gigantic blessing to developers (who use Macs) everywhere and a shining example of open source done well. 👏

Mike McQuaid shared some background on the approaches they’ve taken (and their pros and cons) to make Homebrew financially sustainable.

For predictable donations we set up the standard (at the time at least): a Patreon account. We offered nothing in exchange for donations but to told people we were an entirely volunteer-run project.

… We show users a one-time message on first install or on a Homebrew update to tell them we needed donations and where and how to do so. As soon as this message rolled out we saw a huge jump on donations eventually settling between $2500-$3000 a month on Patreon…

According to Mike McQuaid, the focus of an open source maintainer should be learning to mentor efficiently — where should you be investing your time?

If you’re an open source maintainer lucky enough to have a significant number of contributors you need to learn to mentor efficiently. First timer issues are not the right good way to get people involved in your project nor mentoring individual first-time contributors. Instead, do things that help all of them.

On this week’s Homebrew episode, we discussed Mike’s script that automates the setup of a new Mac.

Listen to the show for an in-depth discussion on why he built it, the value of automating tasks you don’t do often, and to hear how Adam rolls with new machines. Or forget all that and click the headline link to check out Strap for yourself.

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.

Do you want more contributors and maintainers on your project? Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew (macOS package manager), writes on his personal blog:

Here are a a few guidelines in thinking about this:

• Most contributors were users first (“scratching your own itch”: most people start contributing to an open source project to solve a problem they are experiencing)
• Most maintainers were a contributor and user first (people don’t just jump into maintaining a project without helping to build it first)
• Maintainers cannot do a good job without remaining a user (to maintain context, passion and empathy)

Combined, these start to look a bit like a sales funnel. People have to travel through each stage and there’s a fairly hefty drop-off at each one.

Also check out ~> Open source maintainers owe you nothing

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).

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.