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Comment by chmaynard | Hacker News Reader

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chmaynard·

> brew link --force will not link software already provided by macOS.

An explanation for this change would be useful.

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If I had to guess. Probably to prevent tainting the base system.

It depends on the defintion of taint. Homebrew cannot touch the base system, since it lives in /usr/local in macOS. Also macOS SIP prevents modification of most system files.

One major problem is that system and Homebrew versions of library may have incompatible ABIs.

That's the exact reason why I consider MacPorts much more elegant.

Most likely. I still remember the incident where I upgraded my system wide python installation manually and had to reinstall mac os

How php is handled by Homebrew has changed last year. Now you do brew install php@7.1

It was my understanding that if you wanted in your PATH you just did `brew link --force php@7.1`. That's not possible anymore? (Since MacOS provides a php binary) What's the recommended way for easily getting a specific version of php in your PATH?

I've never had to use --force to change my php version. You probably just need to change your PATH so it finds the homebrew version before the system version.

From https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/5383:

> This would have avoided Homebrew/homebrew-core#34754

which links to: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/34754

tl;dr One user had binutils force-linked, causing cmake to pick up the user-installed flavor of binutils, altering cmake’s behavior and causing issues.

Yup, this exactly.

It is not a good idea to change the provided software versions that other parts of the base system can rely on. I would go further than that, modern OS design should make every part of the operating system immutable by default. We could get rid off entire class of security problems if it was like that.

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