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Today, Homebrew does have some major shortcomings. The biggest one that comes to mind for me is the fact that it only seems to consider the dependencies of a pa
by clhodapp 10y ago
Today, Homebrew does have some major shortcomings. The biggest one that comes to mind for me is the fact that it only seems to consider the dependencies of a package during its initial installation. That is, if A depends on B, installing A will trigger an install of B. However, after that, Homebrew will happily let you uninstall B (thus breaking A) without so much as a warning. Less critically, it doesn't track the fact that it only installed B for the purpose of making A work, so it can't help you clean up the left-behind-dependency cruft from the stuff you've since removed.
- mh- 10y agoI don't disagree with your assertion about the state of Homebrew, but I wanted to point out the `leaves` subcommand. brew leaves: Show installed formulae that are not dependencies of another installed formula. I'm not sure if it persists this state or simply calculates it on-the-fly by enumerating your installed formulae. But it does seem like the same data or functionality could be used to prevent your uninstalled-deps scenario.
- clhodapp 10y agoHmm... Interesting. I don't think that "brew leaves" truly solves the problem, though, since the list it generates will include explicitly-installed leaves in addition to no-longer-needed dependencies. It can help narrow the list of potential candidates for removal, though, which is nice.