Today, Homebrew does have some major shortcomings. The biggest one that comes to mind for me is the fact that it only seems to consider the dependencies of a package during its initial installation. That is, if A depends on B, installing A will trigger an install of B. However, after that, Homebrew will happily let you uninstall B (thus breaking A) without so much as a warning. Less critically, it doesn't track the fact that it only installed B for the purpose of making A work, so it can't help you clean up the left-behind-dependency cruft from the stuff you've since removed.
I don't disagree with your assertion about the state of Homebrew, but I wanted to point out the `leaves` subcommand.
brew leaves:
Show installed formulae that are not dependencies of another installed formula.
Hmm... Interesting. I don't think that "brew leaves" truly solves the problem, though, since the list it generates will include explicitly-installed leaves in addition to no-longer-needed dependencies. It can help narrow the list of potential candidates for removal, though, which is nice.
Re:Goodbye Mac OS Forge, hello GitHub
by brazzledazzle on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @02:29PM
(#12346189)
The wheat is mixed with the chaff. Ignoring the jabs at the author and their reasoning the odd way it uses and interacts with /usr/local is worth thinking about. Sometimes challenging conventions is good but sometimes those conventions are there for very good reasons that aren't immediately obvious.
I downvoted you. You assert a massive bunch of things with no evidence. A reasonable person could disagree with every single one of them (I do). While I could imagine your reasons for believing some (most?) of these, I would simply be arguing against the strawman I constructed. By providing actual evidence ("why do you believe this to be the case"), you would allow us have a constructive discussion on your points. Instead, you give us bile.