I didn't know before this post that Homebrew's infamous ‘auto-update’ only automatically updated the dependency closure of whatever you were installing/upgradin

I didn't know before this post that Homebrew's infamous ‘auto-update’ only automatically updated the dependency closure of whatever you were installing/upgrading, which sounds more or less correct to me. > Now, Homebrew has a choice. Either we upgrade _everything_ that depends on `python@3.10` that you have installed or we knowingly break some of the things you have installed that depend on `python@3.10`. We choose the safer option by default. A look at the formulae in homebrew-core shows that Homebrew basically doesn't consider versions in its dependency management at all, so formula are just using the ‘@x.y.z’ in place of all manner of version constraints. So you get wild stuff like this line here[1]: depends_on "curl" # curl >= 7.55 is required wat. Of course the recursive update policy is going to be weirdly painful for some users! Homebrew doesn't even attempt to encode some very basic aspects of dependency, so now (a) you can't know what you're going to break if you do upgrade a common dependency and (b) you can't know when you can afford not to upgrade a dependency shared by a package you're about to install and the already-installed system. The choice you outline above is one that is not faced by most package managers, because they don't make this mistake. The naive wheel reinvention with Homebrew is so eternally disappointing, and it explains a lot of the pain users experience with it. > Homebrew upgrades dependencies and dependents of those dependencies (which, admittedly, can feel like unrelated) One relatively non-disruptive thing you might be able to do to make this behavior less surprising to users is (offer a way to?) print the dependency tree for package installations/upgrades that pull in upgrades of their ‘siblings’. You'd probably want to just do it in a textual way, but this project seems to model the kind of logic you'd want for printing dependency trees with Homebrew as it exists.[2] — 1: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/saldl.rb#L21 https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul... 2: https://github.com/martido/homebrew-graph/blob/master/cmd/brew-graph.rb https://github.com/martido/homebrew-graph/blob/master/cmd/br...