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Ask HN: Do you like Homebrew updating all tools to bleeding edge versions?

3 points by Mystery-Machine ↗ HN
Homebrew is a great tool! It's de-facto standard package manager for macOS.

The reason for this Ask HN is that I saw a comment from one of Homebrew maintainers in this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682031

Here's an excerpt: "because the majority of its [Homebrew] users (developers) want rolling updates for their tooling."

My biggest pain point with Homebrew are its constant trying to update packages to the latest versions. I know there are ways around this like some pointed in that thread. I'm just baffled that that's the default behavior.

I'm wondering how many people prefer this behavior and why?

2 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 13.7 ms ] thread
st3fan
Yes. But I also set HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 and pin things that I would like to keep at a specific version. It is not a big deal really.
Mystery-Machine
To me it is. What happens when you buy a new laptop? How do you share your setup with your coworkers?

I have _all_ installed packages pinned and auto update set to off.

I needed to update a single package recently and then it wasn't updating. Why? Because for `brew upgrade xxx` requires you to first run `brew update`. The only package manager that I know that needs this.

I know there are ways, but why do I have to constantly fight against the tool and be afraid I don't make it unintentionally upgrade a package I don't want it to upgrade (it just installed Node v19 the other day when I needed some tiny tool that worked just fine with Node v18 (the long-term support version aka stable). It's frustrating. :/