Mike McQuaid

Homebrew is an open-source package manager for macOS and Linux. We've made a bunch of changes to how we're running the project, added features and supporting more OSs and architectures than before.

This talk will provide an overview of what we've done since last year's FOSDEM along with a sneak preview of some of the features currently in development and what can be done to test and improve them before they are released to the world.

A description of what changes Homebrew needed to make to get working on macOS 11 Big Sur and what work we've done and are doing to support a new CPU architecture for the first time since Snow Leopard.

Providing details of the biggest changes that Homebrew users have been excited about in the last year: support for Big Sur and the ongoing work for ARM. Provide technical details on what's required for us to support a new operating system from Apple and what the entire Homebrew ecosystem needs to do/change in order to support a new architecture. Nearer the time we'll also be able to provide a status report on how near we are to "official" support.

A talk about the Homebrew package manager and how we've been working with our users to introduce new features to subsets of users, encouraging users to donate to the project and communicating both these to as many users as possible without being annoying.

Talk discussion the major features, leadership and community changes accompanying Homebrew 2.0.0 (which will be released at or shortly after FOSDEM 2019).

This talk will be a talk running through Homebrew's major changes since 1.0.0 and some of the trials and tribulations since then such as maintainers leaving, the lead maintainer position being abolished, becoming more focused and enabling the community to do more for themselves.

How to help users progress from filing bad issues to filing good issues to making simple contributions to making complex contributions to maintaining your open source project. Talks about the open source contribution funnel through which people progress and the best tips for maintainers and contributors to attract and retain more of them on a given project.

Panel discussion with some of the speakers from the Package Management Devroom throughout the day, discussion the future of package management.

Homebrew is a popular package manager for OS X. Compared to most Linux package managers we have some pretty major differences from how we run the project (pull-requests on GitHub) to how we interact with the system (try to use system-provided libraries when possible) and use of root (we actively refuse to use it). Come and hear about how we'd do Homebrew differently if we were starting it from scratch today and what other package managers can learn from our failures and successes.

Homebrew is a popular package manager for OSX. We have a relatively unusual contribution and maintenance model and some practices that differentiate us from other package management systems on both OSX and on Linux. This talk will discuss some of the lessons learnt from maintaining Homebrew to facilitate discussion of how we and other package managers can do better.

The audience for this talk is primarily developers of other package managers and maintainers of Unix distributions. We all do things in slightly different ways so this talk aims to facilitate discussion of what we can do better and how we can work together to minimise repeated work. Audience members will learn about Homebrew, how to encourage more contributions to package managers and how to handle a large number of packages will very few maintainers and time spent.

The plan would be a 15m somewhat interactive talk with 15m discussion afterwards.