To be fair, homebrew shouldn't need to change perms, it should follow common unix standards or at least fit in with OSX rather than require a hack. For years I've felt homebrew should really use either /opt/ or ~/.homebrew/ by default.
> it should follow common unix standards
> or at least fit in with OSX
> rather than require a hack
People keep writing here as if El Cap removes /usr/local entirely. It does not. /usr/local is there by default. You only have to go into recovery mode if you've somehow removed it yourself.
It's worse than that. Homebrew wants 775 $(whoami):admin.
$ /usr/bin/env -i /bin/sh -c \
'id | grep -lw admin >/dev/null && echo admin || echo non-admin'
non-admin
But /usr/local has never been writable by non-privileged users.
Homebrew depends on that nonstandard and undesireable permissions model. Apple doesn't bend to accommodate an inappropriate use.
Hombrew doesn't want to use a location that is outside the default PATH, and they don't want to install with proper permissions, so they purposefully misinterpret the "standard".
Hijinks ensue, and people blame Apple, which is silly.
Remind me again why i should need to reboot into recovery mode to create a directory?
B. If Linus or the FHS changed their ways in this, there would be outrage. It's inappropriate and just plain dumb. [edit: I shouldn't have said "dumb", please replace with "in violation of all guarantees of system integrity".]
C. See above.
You apparently have issues with SIP. That's a separate issue from the current thread, but OK. You should reboot to securely change nvram settings that will allow you to manipulate the protected zone of the file system (including /usr) because this concession to inconvenience saves you from privilege escalation attacks.
The real question is why you deleted /usr/local in the first place. It's standard OSX, and always has been. If you deleted it before SIP, but object to its absence now that SIP applies to the directory where it lives...I'm not sure how to help.
/Applications
/Library
/Network
/System
/User Information
/Users
/Volumes
?Apologies if that was not clear.
You can also argue these people are stupid.
As for standards, vendors follow FHS and friends exactly as far as it helps them justify whatever they want to do.
If you really want to argue from the perspective that "this is standard and that's the reason it's done", that seems awfully silly to me given the layout and other permissions of apple systems.
It's pretty non-FHS/etc to have /Applications be writable, for example.
B. let's be clear: there is outrage no matter what is changed and why, and the argument is always "it is inappropriate and dumb". So this statement is fairly independent of this change.
FHS does not apply to OSX in any way. Why do people think so?
Also, /Applications is not writable by nonprivileged users either!
Agreed on ~"changes yield outrage", but in this case, it's just a software application vendor violating obvious historical and specific guidelines from software OS vendor, and people blaming OS vendor when things break. This perplexes me.
OTOH: The debate here is a little confusing. What SIP is doing w/r/t/ /usr/local isn't unprecedented; securelevels and the immutable flag could have the same effect on OpenBSD all the way back in the 1990s.
Correct, and nonprivileged users can't install software globally on Windows either. Because it's now a modern OS, and that's how things are done. For very good reasons.
His point, as far as I can tell, amounts to: applications should be able to trash permissions on convenient directories and not have the OS complain or repair their damage.
Perhaps I'm being ungenerous here? I apologize if so.
On re read, I realize that tptacek is responding only to the SIP part of the discussion. OK, SIP is surprising to desktop computer users. But it's a good feature that requires a little adjustment to work with. But really not much, and none for the vast majority of users who don't muck with system directories.
I more agree with you than with him, but his argument seems pretty straightforward.
OSX suggests /usr/local as a good location to install software, but insists that the directory itself be owned by root, and protects the parent directory /usr under SIP.
My assertion is that Homebrew is using /usr/local incorrectly (and in contravention to all expectation), and that blaming Apple for the problems thereby created is inappropriate.
I also think SIP is a good thing.
Even assuming OSX is a single user system (which is arguable), it is 2015 and should that single user be able to accidentally damage /usr/local? I think not, that by today an OS should help protect you from broken postinstall script or what not.
Moreover please think about this: homebrew is not wanting /usr/local/ root:admin but instead /usr/local/ `/usr/bin/whoami`:admin.
Further even on our laptops where there is just one user, I use a non-admin user. I have no problems using FUS, GUI prompted temporary admin permissions, or /usr/bin/login -p and sudo day-to-day, but homebrew has a problem with sudo.
Apple SIP has no problem with /usr/local/ 0:0 but homebrew does. Because of shortcuts homebrew has forced a number of poor decisions on it's users.
I use Homebrew and will probably keep doing that because Homebrew is really convenient and just generally works better than MacPorts for me, but what Homebrew is demanding --- ownership over /usr/local --- is not in fact reasonable. It makes a lot of sense to me that OSX will want to keep perms on /usr/local (which is in everyone's PATH) locked down, and so it seems extra hacky that they're going to add a 'brew doctor' check to see if Software Update has "broken" those privileges.
The commenter upthread that suggested Homebrew should use ~/.homebrew or something by default is right.
I would hope though that out of this someone would think, "Hmm... oh drat... yeah I guess this is just one of those things that nobody predicted at first. Shot I think it was a bad idea to have a user own /usr/local/. But you know, it's a good time to improve things... hmm... I know let's build and stage as nobody and then copy under /usr/local/! We still can have binary packages always work and nobody has to mess with PATH, man pages, or dynamic linker trivia. We might have to write something though that asks for a username and password, but whoa... OSX makes that surprisingly easy... I should do that!"
It's not going to be me cause I don't use homebrew, but that would be way better than these hacks that will ammount to people being encouraged to just disable SIP cause of the headache after ever software update.
This is from RedHat. Not implemented by everyone, but modern OSes (e.g. CoreOS) seem to follow the patterns. CoreOS also do everything in their power to prevent you from mounting /usr as writeable.
Perhaps that doesn't pass your bar for 'real' though since it's not globally implemented ;)
(Also, my wife and I both have active accounts on my machine, which makes me uneasy having files in a systemwide directory like /usr/local owned by one specific user. That also feels distinctly non-standard to me.)
[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/h...
This is still accurate. Homebrew creates/manages /usr/local/.git. /usr/local/.gitignore starts with /* which is … not conventional.
Additionally, /usr/local is used by other applications, and there's no way to ensure that it isn't written over by them or by homebrew when installing or upgrading software.
Putting homebrew in /opt/homebrew means that you can have a systemwide directory that is self-contained, can have a working unix hierarchy underneath and should work.
Putting homebrew in ~/.homebrew/ lets you have a user-specific directory that is self-contained with a hierarchy underneath.
In an ideal world, homebrew would use something like /opt/* for systemwide hierarchy and ~/.homebrew for user-specific hierarchy. We don't live in an ideal world, so we just have to make do with fudges to /usr/local permissions for now.
I'm now using /usr/local/bin.
I looked for a guide, no joy. The more opinionated, the better, because I just want to follow the norm.
Here I google.com it for you.
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEUSRHIERARCHY
EDIT: Why is it okay to NOT look up a Standard and be uncertain in your comments when it can be found in 20 seconds tops on the Internet?
I gave this down voted "I googled it for you" because people need to just look up what the Standard is and than speak from a position of knowledge and not some vague non-answer.
For the still lazy the Unix File Hierarchy Standard for /usr
/usr is the second major section of the filesystem. /usr is shareable, read-only data. That means that /usr should be shareable between various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written to. Any information that is host-specific or varies with time is stored elsewhere.
Large software packages must not use a direct subdirectory under the /usr hierarchy.
And no, I am not the one downvoting you.
> The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated. It may be used for programs and data that are shareable amongst a group of hosts, but not found in /usr.
> Locally installed software must be placed within /usr/local rather than /usr unless it is being installed to replace or upgrade software in /usr.
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHI...
It says "The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally."
That seems to kind of conflict with what you quoted "Large software packages must not use a direct subdirectory under the /usr hierarchy.", unless they mean a vendor-specific directory rather than "/usr/local".
I dunno, all I can say is that in my experience on various unixes, it is a "common unix standard" to install software that is not controlled by the OS package manager to /usr/local. I don't interpret "common unix standard" as "FHS" though -- if you mean FHS, say FHS. To me "common unix standard" just means "something that is commonly done on unix". And installing locally-installed (not using OS distro) software to /usr/local is pretty commonly done, as many people can attest. That's why homebrew chose it, they didn't just make it up.
'common unix standard' is whatever POSIX states as standard.
> Homebrew always requires my password to install an app
Instead of trusting Homebrew with /usr/local, you have to trust every formula with `sudo`? Or does it only use sudo for part of it, a `mv` or something?
If you don't run brew as root you at least protect places like /usr/lib, but you are protected from that and more with macports (where stages and uses nobody).
But for now your approach seems the best pragmatic course to take, thank you for the suggestion.
Putting packages installed in a custom /opt/homebrew location would make it harder to install and use software that often assumes a /usr/local possibility, but not an /opt/homebrew it's never heard of.
It is in fact a pretty common place to put non-distro installed software. And was not (and still is not?) used by OSX out of the box. It made a lot of sense for homebrew to use it.