You shouldn't use Brew to obtain dependencies. This is how you end up with people complaining about a brew upgrade replacing the version of Postgres their project depends on.

You probably shouldn't be using dpkg or rpm for that, either, unless your CI and deployment targets are running the exact same version of Linux that you are, and even then—there are usually cleaner and more cross-platform/distro ways to do it, especially if you need to easily be able to build or run older versions of your own software (say, for debugging, for git-bisecting, whatever). I continue to wonder how TF people have been using typical Linux package managers, that they end up footgunning themselves with brew. "Incorrectly", I suspect is the answer, more often than not.

Where it excels is installing the tools that you use, that aren't dependencies of projects, but things you use to do your work.

Get your hammer from Brew. Get your lumber from... uh, the proverbial lumber yard, I suppose. Docker, environment-isolated language-specific package managers, vendored-in libs, that kind of thing.

I don't install project deps with Brew (it's a bad idea, but, again, so is doing that with dpkg or rpm or whatever directly on your local OS, a lot of the time) but I do install: wget, emacs, vscode, any non-Safari browsers I want, various xvm-type programs (nvm, pyenv, that stuff), spectacle, macdown, Slack, irssi, and so on.

That's fine, but almost nobody is running tools on their MBP. So for this sort of thing you'd be using the package manager distributed with glinux. And Google is also a really weird island where tons of tools are custom. You cant use some open source tool for git bisecting because Google doesn't use git. You cant use some open source tool for debugging because borg is a weird custom mess and attaching debuggers requires specialized support.

Google uses git. I used to sit next to Junio Hamano, the primary developer of git, and lots of teams that used my team's services were using git. Lots and lots of teams. There was even an extension to use git with google3, which was really nice, but was replaced with a system that used hg instead.

I was very imprecise. Git is used both for OSS stuff as well as some other stuff. But the norm is development in google3 and even if you've got a layer of git commands on top of that, the actual source and change management is being done by citc/piper.

True, although I predated citc and piper and we definitely built apps locally on machines with source code (from perforce). I was strongly advocating that more people switch to abseil and build their code like open source in the cloud (the vast majority of compiled code doesn't have interesting secrets that could be used to game ranking, or make money from ads).

OK, that makes sense, thanks for the explanation.