Rubenerd

I moved to Homebrew from MacPorts in 2011, and pkgsrc in 2008. I liked how it kept brews in their own directory trees, that brew definitions were easy to read Ruby files, and the tooling was simple.

But then today I was trying to install PerlMagick, like a gentleman, and saw this error for the first time:

$ brew install ImageMagick --with-perl
==> Error: invalid option: --with-perl

I’d been building with this for years. But sure enough, the options tool returning nothing:

$ brew options ImageMagick
==> [crickets]

Something funky was going on. I did some digging, and in August last year options were removed from Homebrew. The justification was:

Options in formulae don’t produce a good user experience because they have to be built from source, we don’t test them in CI and each combination of options provides a new chance for new failures to occur.

I’m ${ADJECTIVE} disappointed, but I can empathise. Testing every permutation of options for every package isn’t feasible, especially for a bootstrapped open source project. Failures would likely also be blamed on Homebrew over the original port. To a user experience engineer or designer, it’s an obvious and easy win to remove this arguably lesser-used feature.

But that’s not an issue with Homebrew, or package managers. It should be expected behavior that people are taking on more responsibility for a package if they build with custom options. That’s why binary packages are installed by default; providing build options is an explicit directive to override what the maintainers have chosen.

This change effectively renders Homebrew a binary-only installer, in line with the Mac App Store. They’re free to do this, but for those of us using Homebrew as the missing package manager for macOS, as per their own slogan, it renders it significantly less useful.

There will doubtlessly be well-intentioned workarounds suggested that are more complex than what we had before. Some of them may work great! But the message being sent is clear: package build options are a hindrance to user experience, and features critical to certain workflows may be revoked at any time.

I’ll see if I can work around this, but it’s also time to keep an open mind about other options. I appreciate all the hard work the Homebrew team have done over the years, but it’s not as good a fit for my use case as it once was.