Being fairly new to programming, I am having trouble understanding exactly what Homebrew does… or rather – why it is needed. I know it contains pip for package management, but so does Virtualenv and I’m planning on installing this in due course.
Does Homebrew install another version of python that is not the system version, upon which you would install Virtualenv and manage the different development environments from there?
I have a clean install of OSX Lion and I want to keep my projects separated, but am unsure why I need Homebrew.
I realise this is basic stuff, but if someone could explain it, I would be grateful.
Homebrew is just a package manager for Mac, like pip for Python. Of course you never need a package manager, you can just get all the programs, or libraries in case of pip and Pypi yourself. The point of package managers however is to ease this process and give you a simple interface to install the software, and also to remove it as that is usually not so simply when compiling things yourself etc.
That being said, Homebrew will only install things you tell it to install, so by just having Homebrew you don’t randomly get new versions of something. Homebrew is just a nice way to install general OSX stuff you need/want in general.