As a very very occasional and light-duty packaging contributor, IMO the best thing Homebrew can do at this point is start writing much better docs for packagers

As a very very occasional and light-duty packaging contributor, IMO the best thing Homebrew can do at this point is start writing much better docs for packagers. The Ruby API doc is very difficult to navigate if you aren't already a Ruby programmer. And it's very hard to know what the "right way" is for doing anything, other than browsing other formulas and hoping you land on a useful example. This is another area where Homebrew has an opportunity to do better than the alternatives. Making it faster wouldn't hurt either, but that's another story ;)