Post

What is the overlap with “uv” from the Python world? If I’m working in Python, I might prefer “uv”, and for rust with “cargo”, etc. they are these sort of hybrid package manager / runtime managers

There's a lot of overlap, but they can work together as well. If you need a tool to provide a Python version, both do that, and Flox can install multiple interpreters side by side without interfering. 1/n

Flox can also install and manage Python dependencies directly, but our Catalog doesn't cover less well-known packages. You may want to stick with uv/poetry/etc for that depending on your needs. 2/n

Ohh. Just installed and replaced brew install of 'gh'.

interesting...but why does it say homebrew in the header ?

You need some serious value add to displace such an ubiquitous tool as homebrew. Flox doesn’t bring it in my case. If reproducibility is crucial to your team, you’d better use VM images.

Reproducibility is one part, but another important feature is scoping packages to specific projects. “flox pull —copy zmitchell/rust” bootstraps every one of my Rust projects. Now I have those tools available if and only if I decide to work on that project. No conflicts with other projects’ tooling.

Cross platform could be big. Biggest headache jumping between OS' and package managers.

> You need a broader set of software. Homebrew has a sizeable collection of packages, but the Flox Catalog is based on Nixpkgs, the largest collection of packages in the world. I publish a couple of binaries to homebrew, do I now need to also publish them with nix or to nixpkgs?

There is a very decent chance they are already in nixpkgs. If they're not, you can join the Flox community slack (link in our github.com/flox/flox readme) and we can help you get them there.

to be honest, as a project maintainer, the proliferation of package managers has been annoying. We have actually gone the opposite direction to simplify and have decided to only support binary downloads from github and our homebrew tap.