Thank you for the amazing exercises and entire team for their amazing work!
I’m using exercism through a CLI utility and recently noticed, that for mac users website suggests to use brew package manager, but for Linux users building it from source.
But as far as I know, brew is available for Linux as well. Nothing really stops any Linux user to use it as well.
Should we maybe modify the download packages to propose brew as well?
Most Linux users don’t use brew so recommending brew on Linux (IMO) seems like you’d be asking Linux users a lot (a large, unneeded dependency).
Not sure if I agree with this generalization.
I’m using Linux on my personal machines for more than 8 years and been using brew for a while. There is a lot of useful software that couldn’t be found in AUR or other repos, that could be easily installed with homebrew (especially, if you’re into development)
Are you saying you think that most Linux users do have Brew installed? I’m sure many Linux users find Brew useful. I just think most likely don’t have it installed.
If experience is somehow relevant here, I’ve been using writing code on Linux for over 20 years, mostly on Archlinux. Though I’m not sure that actually matters here.
I’m a Homebrew fan. Most often the version of a package will be newer than what Debian/Ubuntu will provide. Although downloading a tarball from Github is simple too: if I recall that’s what the “source” path leads to.
I don’t remember dowloading source for using the CLI on my Ubuntu. The wizard proposes a pre-compiled binary from GitHub releases. That’s way better than any package manager…
Well, no. The package manager can tell you when there’s a new version and install it for you.
@skatkov Great that you’re enjoying Exercism. Thanks for the kind words. I didn’t know Brew was available on Linux too - that’s cool.
Is there any reason not to include Brew as an option in the walkthrough? I appreciate we don’t want to encourage people use install Brew just to install Exercism, but if they already have it, is there any reason not to encourage it like we do for Mac?
I can’t think of one. We’re not forcing students to use Brew, but it’s an option worth highlighting. My only thought is if we’re going to end up recommending Brew by the virtue of including it in the wizard, perhaps we should target something more mainstream like Flatpak or Snap as well.
I didn’t think so, so long as it doesn’t imply that Brew is required or the recommended route. I think it should be clear that Brew isn’t necessary.
I’m using Manjaro, with flatpak enabled through pacman - I can’t really find exercism package there.
@IsaacG as a user of ArchLinux has an option to compile exercism-cli or just download a compiled version through AUR packages.
I usually avoid using AUR packages, since those could collide with packages from manjaro repo (they are AUR packages as well, but pre-tested and published with rolling releases).
I typically use brew package manager for situations like this. Even package my own software for homebrew. But it could be that my case is not “ordinary” or typical Linux case - I tend to use OSX for work and Linux on my personal machines.
I believe that is accurate 
Most Linux users aren’t using Archlinux. I suspect most Archlinux users use AUR for packages which are not in the Arch repo. After all, AUR is the official repo for non official packages.
FYI, we recently removed snap because it breaks the CLI for reasons that I don’t know 
My take is that as we already push to Homebrew ourselves, it’s no extra work for us to manage and if people do use Brew, its nice to support it.
Does anyone have any stats on what % of people do use Brew for Linux?
All that said, it’s not going to be high on my priority list to add this so I’d rather someone in the community do it if it’s to be done. It needs adding to this repo: GitHub - exercism/interactive-cli-walkthrough
