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At my company, Homebrew is the de facto package manager for Mac. My team doesn't prefer constant rolling updates, but we do work around them. Have you polled us
by the_jeremy 4y ago
At my company, Homebrew is the de facto package manager for Mac. My team doesn't prefer constant rolling updates, but we do work around them. Have you polled users in any way to be sure that 99% of them consider this a feature, and not an issue they have to deal with?
- richbell 4y agoRolling updates are the #1 source of "I don't understand why this isn't working anymore, it worked just fine yesterday!" and annoyances when you need a specific package version (n-2) to align with your deployment environment and Homebrew keeps updating to the bleeding edge. (Beggars can't be choosers, etc. — I recognize the utility that Homebrew has provided to millions of people, that doesn't mean I can't mention its problems.)
- woodruffw 4y agoIt's based on our historical experience maintaining versions (or, at minimum, trying to not change the core DSL such that older formulae continue to work): we get an order of magnitude more requests for updates than requests for older versions, and even fewer specific complaints about breakage. When a particular package (or version) is widely adopted and difficult to migrate away from (like versions of LLVM, Postgres, or Python), we provide `@`-discriminated versions to allow people to migrate at their own pace. If there's a particular formula you want versioned that we don't currently, please open an issue so that we can discuss it!