Homebrew

Today I’d like to announce Homebrew 1.2.0. The most significant change since 1.1.0 is that most Homebrew taps (package repositories) in the Homebrew GitHub organisation have been deprecated and the currently buildable software moved into Homebrew/homebrew-core. This will improve the quality and availability of all their software.

Additionally, as Homebrew/homebrew-versions has been moved into Homebrew/homebrew-core Homebrew provides better, official support for different versions. You can read more about this in the dedicated versions document. Please note our goal isn’t to support all versions of all software but to provide some versions and tooling such that you can easily maintain more in your own tap (package repository).

Since 1.1.0 the following deprecations have been made:

• env :std and env :userpaths in formulae
• OS.mac? and OS.linux? in formulae
• fails_with :llvm in formulae
• 32-bit options in formulae
• go get usage in formulae
• formulae dependencies that need built with non-default options
• new formulae that require patches
• language module requirements (e.g. depends_on "pygments.rb" => :ruby)
• Universal options and builds of formulae
• brew tap of deprecated, official taps
• brew cask update command
• brew linkapps and brew unlinkapps commands
• Various internal APIs on ENV. and elsewhere

While all the functionality for these deprecations will be supported for the foreseeable future in Homebrew/brew for 3rd-party usage, Homebrew/homebrew-core will be removing the use of these APIs from formulae to improve the user experience.

Since 1.1.0 some new commands are available:

• brew cask outdated shows outdated Casks
• brew formula outputs the location of a formula
• brew update-reset simplifies cleaning up broken repositories

Some of the other changes since 1.1.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• brew create uses GitHub metadata to populate fields when creating from a GitHub archive
• brew audit provides --only and --except flags to allow selectively running brew audit methods
• brew search uses a single GitHub API call for searching all Homebrew and Caskroom taps
• brew install creates symlinks in opt for formulae aliases (such as versioned aliases)
• brew update will symlink shell completions provided by taps
• brew tests runs all cask tests (replacing brew cask-tests) and all tests use RSpec rather than MiniTest
• New download strategies were added for handling private GitHub repositories
• We store (and report to anonymous analytics) whether a package was installed as a dependency or on request. This is returned as part of brew info --json=v1. This is useful in differentiating between top installed packages based on user demand vs. based on large numbers of dependents. This is also used by brew bundle dump and brew bundle cleanup to handle dependencies more sensibly.
• Xcode prerelease warnings have been removed
• brew reinstall, upgrade and install always output used options
• brew tap-new uses our latest Travis CI recommended configuration providing zero-configuration CI for all formulae taps
• brew uninstall now refuses to uninstall a package if other packages that depend on it are still installed
• RuboCop is used for formulae desc audits and checking the order of methods in formulae rather than requiring brew audit be run. This also allows these checks to be run automatically in any editor with RuboCop integration.
• Setting HOMEBREW_ENV_FILTERING will filter all custom user environment variables from brew. Eventually we hope to enable this by default.
• Sensitive tokens in the environment are hidden from untrusted 3rd-party code in brew install and brew test
• brew services provides better error reporting using new macOS APIs

And finally:

• A new documentation site is at docs.brew.sh
• A dump of installation, installation on request and build error events is provided on this site
• Homebrew’s mailing list has been deprecated in favour of our Discourse forum
• Homebrew accepts donations through Patreon. If you can afford it, please consider donating.
• Homebrew uses HackerOne for security vulnerability disclosure
• Homebrew’s CI servers are now provided by MacStadium and DigitalOcean. Thanks to Positive Internet for years of friendship, incredible customer support and super reliable hosting.

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Enjoy using Homebrew!

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