Comment by mikemcquaid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikemcquaid | Hacker News Reader

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> Especially since homebrew force-updates itself and there's no way for users to avoid these changes.[1]

This is not true. `man brew` documents how to disable auto-updates.

> Why exactly is this kind of purist decision being imposed on users?

Because there's a lot of current debate about whether things being relicensed under the Commons Clause is "open source" or not and we'd rather lean on an established, well-documented authority on what that definition is. Additionally, part of our agreed membership of the Software Freedom Conservancy (who help us with a lot) involves ensuring our core formulae are open source software.

> So you're going to periodically make maintenance changes to my system without my permission. Goodie.

Again, `brew man` documents how to disable this.

---

The complaint behind the individual complaints is "why doesn't Homebrew work the way I want it to". That's a reasonable complaint and there may be better tools for you to use rather than Homebrew but we're going to continue to build Homebrew to work in a way that works best for the majority of our users and avoids our (entirely voluntary) maintainers having to deal with the same issues again and again.

As someone who uses homebrew religiously, but isn't familiar with the inner-workings, I'll second the sentiment that some whys on the changes would be much appreciated.

Otherwise it just looks like a bunch of scary behavior changes w/o a clear upside.

that's a really good suggestion. As someone that writes a lot of changelogs, they would really benefit from including _why_ and not just _what_.

I do think, however, that users greatly underestimate how much time it takes to write up a good changelog. Even one that is as simple as this.

Yeh, that's it in a nutshell, unfortunately. I wish I had more time to write great changelogs for Homebrew but I don't :(

I'd rather you write the code. Keep up the good work.

Hopefully these changes will allow you more time to focus on adding value to the vast majority of users. If a small subset of folks need the marginal functionality, it should be up to them to step up to the plate and make it happen.

Thanks for the kind words.

> Hopefully these changes will allow you more time to focus on adding value to the vast majority of users. If a small subset of folks need the marginal functionality, it should be up to them to step up to the plate and make it happen.

100% agree.

Not for me to tell you how to prioritize your time, of course, but I'll just say in my experience programmers tend to vastly over-index on the importance of stuff like crushing code and under-index on the importance of stuff like communicating w/ the community. Non-tech tasks are still hugely important.

Cheers, and thanks for your work on homebrew. It really is a great tool.

Thanks for the kind words.

For what it's worth, I really do value this stuff which is why we have release notes at all, a Discourse forum, etc. most of which I've setup and run :)

Re auto-updating: thanks for that, which is something.

For those who haven't had a chance to dig through, prompted by this, I searched through the man page [1] on GitHub and apparently the environment variable to set is:

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Manpage.md

There's also `HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS` (which I personally set) so you can still auto-update but do so a little bit less often.

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