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Let me start by saying Homebrew is incredibly valuable and useful. That said, the insistence on everything updating all the time is very frustrating. Being stu
by bilalq 4y ago
Let me start by saying Homebrew is incredibly valuable and useful.
That said, the insistence on everything updating all the time is very frustrating. Being stuck waiting 30 seconds when trying to install something because brew is updating despite no one asking it to, random things breaking after an update, and needing to find escape hatches so an older version of some package can be installed are all pretty painful.
Perhaps I too am in the minority here.
- woodruffw 4y agoI think I've answered the part about why we do bleeding edge updates below, but for the auto-updating and upgrading behavior: you can set `HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1` and `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE=1` in your shell environment. The former will prevent silent updates of the taps, and the latter will prevent unrequested upgrades of outdated formulae (per tap state).
- giantrobot 4y agoMaking those behaviors the default would better serve the Principal of Least Surprise.
- woodruffw 4y agoHomebrew is just git under the hood, so upgrading an arbitrarily old core and tap state to the latest release may not result in a correct migration. That’s arguably more surprising, since a user then has to contend with broken package state instead of the occasional inconvenience of an auto-upgrade.
- giantrobot 4y agoMy issue is installing a package. Brew has a local state of the universe. It could just install the new package I ask for. Instead it installs the package plus updates for other packages I have installed. More than once I've had those unrequested updates break. Then I'm stuck yak shaving trying to fix some random package because I dared to install a new one. I really appreciate the work all the Homebrew developers do. But I've lost a lot of time chasing down problems caused just because I installed some stupid utility.