officially sanction homebrew as the installation method of choice for macos

[AlJohri]

this should be merged after #252 is released

[cs01]

Looks good, but the doc changes need to be generated. See https://pipxproject.github.io/pipx/contributing/#documentation.

[cs01]

Is installing via homebrew better than pip somehow? To me it seems like it adds more headaches with PATH issues and figuring out which Python was used to install it. And it also adds a delay in using releases published to PyPI since it uses a different package registry.

IME on a mac, installing pipx with pip has worked identically to Linux, which I don't see as a bad thing.

[gaborbernat]

I personally would recommend pip with user level as bootstrap step, and then use pipx for pipx... Going ahead.

[cs01]

and then use pipx for pipx

Are you saying you do something like this?

pip install pipx
pipx install pipx
pip uninstall pipx

[AlJohri]

I do think it's better. I'm the go-to guy at work for debugging python installations and people muck it up in the craziest ways. From using system python, pyenv, asdf, homebrew python, pip local install, it can be very confusing exactly how the tool has been installed and what might be interfering with it.

I find package manager installations (homebrew) offer some sanity in that it is installed to the same place, every time, regardless of your personal choice in python.

All the other bootstrap methods I've seen (like the one you posted above) seem necessarily confusing for the average user.

I prefer to use homebrew even for very popular python command line tools like csvkit and only use pipx when a system package does not exist (i.e. nbdime, poetry, envdir, etc.).

As far as update cycle, I believe it should be fairly easy to automate the homebrew releases.

I found the fact that pipenv had packages on most common distros a very great UX:

[cs01]

@AlJohri thanks for the rationale. I'll approve/merge when the docs are all generated (see my previous comment).

[cs01]

Generally I have been generating docs as changes are made, but there is some discussion about whether generating docs should only be done at the time of publishing to PyPI in #289. Therefore I will merge these changes as-is while the discussion continues.