Mike - just wanted to say thanks for all you (and the other Homebrew volunteers) do! My mac dev experience is 100x better with Homebrew - it's literally the first thing I install when I get a new machine.

Perhaps in situations like this Homebrew could alert the user "Hey, this package hasn't been updated in a while and 40 other packages depend on it so this is going to take a while. Press enter to confirm or cancel and use an alternative method (HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE) to just upgrade the one package. Caveat - this may break things."