Here's my previously posted actual concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903499

I know that there are usually workarounds to these problems, but they tend to be obscure, and change frequently, and are not simple to look up.

Pacman, apt, portage, etc have much more stable interfaces. But the workarounds for my edge cases in Homebrew from a year ago don't work anymore. Even knowing what is an edgecase or not is a problem.

Most of these issues would be fine if the interface changed as slowly and consistently as Linux package managers.

I posted a detailed comment of why Homebrew is a problem for me[1] if you would like to see.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29080519

It’d be nice if it asked if it’s ok to remove old versions of dependencies when installing a new package. It’d also be nice for it to not upgrade, say, wireshark and nginx when installing, say, ffmpeg, without asking first.

You might be interested in `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP` and `HOMEBREW_NO_CLEANUP_FORMULAE`. See `man brew` for details.

Yeah, I’m going to put those in my rc file. I’m surprised they aren’t the default options but that’s not a big deal.

`HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP` used to be the default. Many users complained about how much space Homebrew used, and were shocked by how much they saved by doing `brew cleanup`, so now it’s done by default.