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Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

It does kind of make sense to me that user-owned things should kind of live in /Users/username.

Unfortunately that pattern in this case would lead to the redundant-seeming /Users/username/usr/local, but at least that's rooted to the user in the event other users don't want a "global" Homebrew install.

Also, I believe (even if it kills some ignorant build scripts) that Homebrew lets you reconfigure where this directory lives, anyway.

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It's very common for linux applications to store stuff in $XDG_DATA_HOME (~/.local/share by default) (config files and caches go somewhere else)

In my ~/.local I also have a bin/ directory (created by some Haskell tool), so rather than putting stuff in /Users/username/usr/local, I think it might make more sense to recreate the (needed parts of) a unix fs hierarchy in /Users/username/.local

There's also ~/LibrarySupport on Macosx, if I remember correctly... but I think that contains user editable configuration files as well

> There's also ~/LibrarySupport on Macosx, if I remember correctly...

You're probably thinking of `~/Library/"Application Support"`.

Homebrew can be installed anywhere, and after ~2 years of having it outside of /usr/local I have not run into any problems. There is a disclaimer somewhere that states some "packages" may not work well with this setup, but that seems like an upstream bug to me. Things should not require things to live in a specific path or prefix.

Where does your homebrew live? I have a few different users on my mac that I want to all share resources so I've kept it in /usr/local (also the "easiest" because it was the default).

TBH, things like this make me really mis debian. It's really nice when your package manager is a first class citizen (and geared towards software development rather than consumption).

It's in /opt, so it's just:

    PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:$PATH

I considered a ~/ directory but wanted it available for the rare occasion when there is someone ssh'd into my machine (though I didn't go so far as to update the system-wide shell configs to use it.

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