While Homebrew is perhaps technically crude and somewhat inflexible compared to other and older package managers, I think it deserves real credit for being so easy to add packages to. I contributed Homebrew packages after a few weeks of using macOS, while I didn't contribute a single package in the ten years I ran Debian.<p>I'm also impressed by the focus of the maintainers and their willingness (really, <i>enthusiasm</i>) for saying <i>no</i> and cutting features. We need more of that in the programming field. Homebrew is unashamedly solely for running the standard configuration of the newest version of well-behaved programs, which covers at least 90% of my use cases. I use Nix when I want something complicated or nonstandard.<p>(Incidentally, I also contributed Nix derivations after only a few weeks of running NixOS, so Homebrew is not the only good package manager.)
Just ran an update and got this:<p><pre><code> ==> Homebrew has enabled anonymous aggregate formulae and cask analytics.
Read the analytics documentation (and how to opt-out) here:
https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics
</code></pre>
Opt-out analytics capture? A bit of a shame it's not opt-in.<p>The fix is to run:<p><pre><code> brew analytics off</code></pre>
Homebrew is built on the assumption that you should always be running the latest version of homebrew and the latest version of all the packages you've installed. If something doesn't work, you're forced to update everything to the latest versions and hope that fixes things.<p>In general I don't like this constant pressure to abandon old versions of things, it doesn't really benefit anyone. A fragmented world is a decentralized world.
I really wish more release documentation pointed you to how to perform that upgrade. This page, the front page, nor the installation pages show up to upgrade.<p>No, it isn't "hard" to figure out, and I personally know how to do it, but for newer users it puts up a barrier to entry.
I'm just glad Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra and above are still fully supported since I have a computer which is stuck on that release (incompatible with 10.14).
Homebrew + Caskroom has made my zero touch deployments flawless. A little bash, some DEPNotify, a rock solid MDM, and Apple’s DEP, I can ship a Mac to any employee in the world and have them boot the computer, create their local account, and all of the latest third party apps get installed automatically.<p>Ten years ago this would have taken a lot of engineering. Today it’s just bash calling Homebrew to do the heavy lifting.
The problem of Homebrew is the language it's written in. Porting it into something native and faster, maybe Go, maybe Rust - will make the user experience way better.