Homebrew Kickstarter

17 May 2015

The video for the Homebrew Kickstarter project.
Show transcript
  • 0:00 Hi, my name is Mike McQuaid and I'm one of the developers on the Homebrew project.
  • 0:06 Homebrew is a package manager for OSX. That basically means you can use it to install software
  • 0:11 typically servers or other stuff you run from the terminal on Macs.
  • 0:15 We're asking for money to help make Homebrew better for you by making it easier for us to do development
  • 0:20 and let computers do the boring stuff that we can automate.
  • 0:23 Homebrew relies heavily on her volunteer contributions.
  • 0:26 Our thousands of packages known as formulae are kept working up to date by thousands of volunteers
  • 0:31 and are added to the repository by one of the six people with commit access, of which I'm one.
  • 0:35 I'll run you through the process we use to test and accept community contributions.
  • 0:39 Here you can see a pull request on GitHub, albeit one I've already closed.
  • 0:46 This means someone has requested we change a part of Homebrew, usually a formula.
  • 0:50 I'll have a quick look through the changes to make sure they aren't doing anything crazy
  • 0:54 and then copy and paste this URL into the terminal and run brew pull, a command that I developed previously, to test changes.
  • 1:01 Pull request changes were downloaded to my local machine and it's now building any formula that we changed.
  • 1:11 This is successful, then I'll push the change to the repository.
  • 1:15 We provide binary packages for some formulae, which are known as bottles.
  • 1:22 To build them, I need to do what I just did, but of course a virtual machine for each platform we support.
  • 1:26 Currently, Mountain Lion, Lion and Snow Leopard, and upload these packages.
  • 1:30 All changes requested to Homebrew require testing and checking by the commands we've built for that purpose, such as brew audit, which checks the formula file for style violations, and brew pull, which I showed you earlier.
  • 1:42 Wouldn't it be great if this could be done automatically, so we only need to spend time on the changes that weren't working.
  • 1:57 This is why Homebrew needs your money.
  • 2:00 With your help, you can buy a Mac mini, or perhaps multiple, which we'll always be running to check community contributions, build binary packages, and test Homebrew.
  • 2:10 I've already developed a command called brew test bot, which automates most of this process, and set up a Jenkins installation to run this on a shared machine.
  • 2:18 This isn't publicly accessible, and as we share the hardware, we can't make use of it for its full potential.
  • 2:25 I'm excited about the potential for improvement to Homebrew for its users, and I hope you can help us make Homebrew even better by funding Homebrew's brew test bot.
  • 2:33 Thanks for watching.