Homebrew creator Max Howell is back with a brand new invention:

tea is a standalone, binary download for all platforms that puts the entire open source ecosystem at your fingertips. Casually and effortlessly use the latest and greatest or the oldest and most mature from any layer of any stack. Break down the silos between programming communities, throw together scripts that use entirely separate tools and languages and share them with the world with a simple one-liner.

All you need is tea.

Bold! I love how many interesting ideas are packed in to this project: pipelines, universal virtual-env, executable markdown… the list goes on. Check out the README for all the deets. My big question is: might Max and the team be thinking too big this time around?

Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, has gone back to his notes on brew2 to apply web3 concepts to help “distribute value to open source.” He’s calling this new brew tea.

Tools like Homebrew lie beneath all development tools, assisting developers to actually get development done. We know the graph of all open source, which means we’re uniquely placed to innovate in interesting and exciting ways. This is exactly what tea will do. We’re taking our knowledge of how to make development more efficient and throwing innovations nobody has ever really considered before.

With plans to move the package registry on-chain, Max lays out the numerous benefits due to “inherent benefits of blockchain technology”:

• Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents)
• Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage)
• Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust)
• Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution
• Token can flow through the graph

Max says “token flowing is where things get really interesting,” and goes on to say “with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it.”

(Thanks to Omri Gabay for sharing this first in our community Slack)

Avoid migrating your Swift scripts to packages and using swift build just to include a dependency. Change #!/usr/bin/swift to #!/usr/bin/swift sh and you’re good to go:

#!/usr/bin/swift sh

import PromiseKit  // @mxcl ~> 6.5

firstly {
    after(.seconds(2))
}.done {
    print("Scripts with package dependencies!")
    exit(0)
}

RunLoop.main.run()