Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?
Homebrew project leader here: I hope you&#x27;re able to find a package manager that better fits your needs and I&#x27;m sorry that Homebrew is not currently doing so.<p>---<p>Homebrew upgrades dependencies and dependents of those dependencies (which, admittedly, can feel like unrelated) on installation and upgrade. As mentioned in other comments, you can customise this behaviour with `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE` or `HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE`.<p>Homebrew does this because the alternative is sometimes breaking things. An example:<p>- you want to install `virtualenv` that depends on `python@3.10`<p>- the binary package for `virtualenv` you want requires the newest `python@3.10`<p>- this upgrades `python@3.10` on installation<p>Now, Homebrew has a choice. Either we upgrade _everything_ that depends on `python@3.10` that you have installed or we knowingly break some of the things you have installed that depend on `python@3.10`. We choose the safer option by default.<p>The more time left between updating&#x2F;upgrading, the more likely to have more dependencies updated which requires more dependents to be updated.<p>---<p>Regardless, I appreciate this is a problem and we&#x27;re still figuring out potential solutions for this problem. A reminder that we&#x27;re a volunteer run project so it&#x27;s not always as easy as we&#x27;d like it to be to get these changes out quickly.