It rather sounds like your preference for brew is that brew is a user-level tool that can't update system packages. There's certainly a case to be made user-sco

It rather sounds like your preference for brew is that brew is a user-level tool that can't update system packages. There's certainly a case to be made user-scoped package managers are valuable, but "my package manager is capable of updating everything including my kernel" is a feature, not a bug, IMO - brew's constant conflicts with OS X's Apple-provided toolchains should be more than sufficient evidence as to why. apt-get et al are extremely capable package managers, and in my experience result in much more stable and consistent installs than brew does, specifically because it can be aware of things like OS-level dependencies which it can then manage.