homebrew-graph VS dotfiles

wat.

Of course the recursive update policy is going to be weirdly painful for some users! Homebrew doesn't even attempt to encode some very basic aspects of dependency. The choice you outline above is one that is not faced by most package managers, because they don't make this mistake. The naive wheel reinvention with Homebrew is so eternally disappointing, and it inevitably explains a lot of the pain users experience with it.

> Homebrew upgrades dependencies and dependents of those dependencies (which, admittedly, can feel like unrelated)

One relatively non-disruptive thing you might be able to do to make this behavior less surprising to users is (offer a way to?) print the dependency tree for package installations/upgrades that pull in upgrades of their ‘siblings’. You'd probably want to just do it in a textual way, but this project seems to model the kind of logic you'd want for printing dependency trees with Homebrew as it exists.[2]

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1: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul...

2: https://github.com/martido/homebrew-graph/blob/master/cmd/br...

I also use Nix, and agree with these caveats. My personal experience is that it can be hard to initially set up Nix, but once you do, it's rock solid. It's particularly great for sharing config across machines. Here's my personal dev environment for instance: https://github.com/mjhoy/dotfiles/blob/main/nix/nixpkgs/conf...