Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

Posted by mikemcquaid 7 hours ago

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate).

Happy to discuss any questions here!

515 points | 128 commentspage 3

ansonhoyt 4 hours ago|

Is there a way to `brew trust` inside my Brewfile? That'd be nice for the handful of formulas I install from github repos via `brew bundle --global`.

usrme 3 hours ago||

This is described here (https://docs.brew.sh/Tap-Trust) if you scroll down a bit.

dpassen1 3 hours ago||

`brew tap/recipe, trusted: true`

nosioptar 2 hours ago||

I used OSX for about a year about 10 years ago. Homebrew was what made it worth using OSX. Thanks for all the effort put into homebrew.

I'd use it today on Linux, but I'm pretty anal about only using software from the distribution repos (or compiled locally if not available.)

holysantamaria 2 hours ago||

I will try this new release of brew but I have been extremely satisfied with determinate nix so far. It completely changed my confidence in installing new stuff

swingboy 3 hours ago||

Interesting that the `brew-rs` experiment has concluded and didn't find much of a performance increase. I suppose that is expected though with a lot of the bottleneck being network IO?

jwr 2 hours ago||

Thanks for all the work you put into this over the years. Homebrew became my go-to solution for installing software on my Macs (after MacPorts) and I just realized that someone has been doing all that work for me for so long. Much appreciated!

shawkinaw 2 hours ago||

Could really use a good rollback mechanism, is there one in the works perchance? I have broken my home server multiple times with bad InfluxDB and Grafana updates, and rollback was a huge pain. I’ve now disabled cleanup so old versions of packages are kept, but there must be a better way.

chuckreynolds 2 hours ago||

Brew is so good... just sponsored on github. Thanks for the hard work!

0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago||

Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)

mikemcquaid 3 hours ago||

Glad you've found a workflow that works for you, genuinely.

For others still using Homebrew: a lot of work has gone into upgrading only when we absolutely have to and showing these upgrades to the user before we do them, including in this release.

pjm331 1 hour ago||

and i `brew update && brew upgrade --greedy` every morning with my first cup of coffee because i like to live on the edge like that

thanks for all your work!

ryandrake 2 hours ago|||

I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.

1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

frollogaston 2 hours ago|||

I switched to MacPorts because of permission issues with brew, used it for years, then switched back after MacPorts inexplicably started wanting to install like 9000 packages just to install something small-ish like wget. Which is probably just as likely to happen with any other package manager but whatever.

PufPufPuf 3 hours ago|||

I'm in the "switched most to Mise" stage, might look into MacPorts for the remaining stuff, thanks for the tip!

bigyabai 3 hours ago||

Nix is also worth checking out, even if the Darwin packaging is a bit flaky. I really appreciate having cross-platform devshells when I have to alternate between Mac and Linux on a regular basis.

PufPufPuf 3 hours ago||

Mise is also cross-platform, we actually use it at work for projects we develop locally on macOS, then build in CI on Linux -- it even supports multiplatform lockfiles. I had a few tries with Nix but it's a lot to wrap your head around, Mise is simple to "just try".

pknerd 3 hours ago||

Thanks for producing such an amazing piece of software. Most of my Mac installations are based on Homebrew, but I have to rely on version management tools like Pyenv or nvm for Python and Node. Wish there was some standard 'Homebrew' way to install multiple versions of node, php and Python

PufPufPuf 3 hours ago||

Have a look at https://mise.jdx.dev/, it's exactly what you're looking for!

mikemcquaid 3 hours ago||

There's a selection of ways that may or may not work for you:

- `formula@version` packages

- `brew version-install` (which uses `brew extract` and `brew tap-new` under the hood)

- `version_file:` support in `brew bundle

- `brew pyenv-sync`

jamesgill 2 hours ago|

I know this runs on Linux too. As a Linux user, I'm unclear on why I might use this instead of apt or dnf, for example. Any Linux users out there have experience with both Homebrew and one of these?

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