Homebrew

Today I’d like to announce Homebrew 1.8.0. The most significant changes since 1.7.0 are official Mojave support, linkage auto-repair on brew upgrade, brew info displaying analytics data and quarantining Cask’s downloads.

Major changes and deprecations since 1.7.0:

• Download strategies unused by Homebrew/homebrew-core have been deprecated
• We no longer provide support for devel specs in Homebrew/homebrew-core (due to CI overhead)
• When a bottle isn’t available for your version of macOS we will use a bottle from an older version instead
• I (Mike McQuaid) will step down as lead maintainer on February 4th when the Homebrew maintainers meet in person for the first time
• Mojave is officially supported (and El Capitan unsupported)
• brew upgrade automatically reinstalls or upgrades formulae with broken linkage
• brew shellenv outputs configuration variables for Homebrew (and was reimplemented in Bash for speed)
• brew info displays analytics data. This is the way that Homebrew maintainers query analytics data so we are using the same data as the community.
• JSON is used to marshal child process errors to avoid potential security issues
• Homebrew Cask’s downloads are quarantined
• brew extract is a new command to extract old versions of formulae from Git history
• Homebrew Cask’s installs report analytics events
• brew cask search and brew cask cleanup are deprecated in favour of brew search and brew cleanup

Other changes since 1.7.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:

• brew gist-logs --private creates private gists
• Setting HOMEBREW_FORCE_HOMEBREW_ON_LINUX disables using Linuxbrew settings when using Homebrew on Linux
• brew style checks Bash style with shellcheck and uses RuboCop RSpec by default
• brew cleanup removes old or unnecessary portable Rubies and linkage caches
• brew linkage uses a JSON cache to increase reliability
• brew update-reset accepts a repository argument
• bundle install --standalone is used to handle vendored gems. This is used to use ActiveSupport File.atomic_write, ActiveSupport Hash#deep_merge, String#delete_prefix backport and ActiveSupport Object#blank? and #present? rather than maintaining our own poor imitations.
• brew update follows GitHub API redirects
• Directories that need to be writable are created automatically and checked more thoroughly
• brew linkage data is used to check for multiple simultaneous versioned formulae linkage. This is more permissive than the previous recursive dependency check.
• brew bundle check --verbose displays what software is missing and causing a brew bundle check to fail
• brew update prints a one-time donation request

Finally:

• Many Homebrew maintainers will be attending FOSDEM 2019. Consider coming along and saying hello!
• Homebrew still accepts donations through Patreon. If you can afford it, please consider donating. If you’d rather not use Patreon, check out the other ways to donate in our README.

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