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Comment by benesch | Hacker News Reader

My biggest frustration with the auto-update is how long it takes. I wouldn’t mind the auto-update in the slightest if it took 5s instead of 30s. It’s ironic (and a testament to your work on bottling) that the longest phase of installing a formula, even one with many deps, is waiting for `brew update` to complete.

I’m curious if you have plans to make `brew update` faster. Is it really just `git pull` that’s that slow?

Apologies for griping. Homebrew has made my life much, much better—thanks for all your hard work!

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We've tried and got `brew update` pretty much as fast as we can (at least for the no-op case). I literally added a new GitHub API to make this faster: https://developer.github.com/changes/2016-02-24-commit-refer...

Would definitely welcome any help making this faster, though!

> Apologies for griping. Homebrew has made my life much, much better—thanks for all your hard work!

I wanted to particularly highlight this part of your comment: stuff like this is really kind, not common and really helps with my motivation to work on Homebrew. Thank you too!

> I wanted to particularly highlight this part of your comment: stuff like this is really kind, not common and really helps with my motivation to work on Homebrew. Thank you too!

I'd love to chime in while we're at it. Thanks Mike, for your awesome work on Homebrew. My life is significantly better because of it. I remember back in the 2000s how I would literally spend hours at times figuring how to fix compilation errors, Googling for undocumented CFLAGS, etc. Homebrew is such a pleasure to work with, and it feels like it just keeps getting better. I have no idea how, but it does.

Less time spent tinkering with build flags means I get my work done faster, which means less time working and more time with my family. You rock.

UPDATE: Just set up a $10/month contribution to you folks on Patreon. Here's the link for anyone else who's interested in contributing: https://www.patreon.com/homebrew

I would like to chime in as well :). Homebrew is and has always been awesome in my exerience. Besides just working all the time, I love how extendable it is by providing your own taps. For example, I use railwaycat's emacs-mac tap. Thanks to Homebrew mituharu's Emacs version is just two commands away.

I also regularly just local software in /usr/local/Cellar/<name>/<version> to be able to use brew link/unlink et al. to manage symlinks.

Keep up the great work!

Ps. I just noticed that it's possible to donate on a non-recurring basis now as well. Great!

Also super grateful, homebrew has made my personal and professional life much easier. Thanks so much!

Thanks so much for maintaining homebrew!

apt-get update just took 15s on my Debian to finish. The thing is, I actually never run apt-get update, I just have a cron job which runs it before installing security upgrades.

Ideally homebrew would be faster, but in the meantime you could run updates in the background regularly enough so that you never have to do it while running a brew command interactively (if you use the parameter that has been suggested).

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