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Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

There has been a lot of talk in HN comments recently about Homebrew installing to `/usr/local`. With macOS Sierra, the user can no longer write to this folder without specifically owning it. Is there a security risk here and if so, whats the best workaround?

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Newer versions install in `/usr/local/Homebrew`, older versions "migrate" there:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/253404/how-does-hom...

Awesome, thanks for that. Would be good for it to be listed on the article. It only tells you that it no longer requires ownership after you have been asked to give it for the migration.

I have a hard time understanding the "migration", even after reading all the related issues. Homebrew still writes into /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/Cellar, nothing different from the past. What exactly changes?

Writing to /usr/local/bin is not the same as writing to /usr/local. We don't drop a README.md in /usr/local anymore, for instance, and you can change the ownership of /usr/local back to root:wheel after the migration.

I've always installed to ~/.homebrew, and never encountered any problems.

Does this mean all your packages are built from source?

I always install to /opt/brew and I see a few packages compile, but I see bottles being used too. Now that you mention it, I guess most software that needs to link against dynamic libraries wouldn't work from bottle unless your setup was the same as where it was compiled... hmm. I don't mind. :)

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