I wrote a blog post a while back about my experiments with Homebrew, which covers most of the major security concerns I have with it. I hope it&#x27;s clear from the post (linked below) that I went into the process with an open mind, and even positive expectations, because so many people really like Homebrew. But, I was alarmed at the implications of some of the decisions they&#x27;ve made; I understand why they made the design choices they made, but I don&#x27;t think the trade off is even close to worth it. It is, as noted, particularly scary for server use, but I would be hesitant to use it for any purpose.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;inthebox.webmin.com&#x2F;homebrew-package-installation-for-servers" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;inthebox.webmin.com&#x2F;homebrew-package-installation-for...</a><p>After that post was written, I continued to tinker with Homebrew (because it is so popular, it was really hard to completely toss it aside), but found a number of other problems. While it has lots of packages and they are often very up to date, updating over time and upgrading&#x2F;downgrading versions, both proved fragile.<p>In a world with so many really good package managers, I find it unfortunate that the one that captured so many people&#x27;s imagination and enthusiasm is broken by design, and in ways that have been understood for decades (even before good package managers, it was understood that you don&#x27;t run all your servers as the same user). Or, at the very least, cannot ever be a general purpose package manager for operating systems; if you understand the limitations and know you can never safely deploy to servers using Homebrew, and only ever use it on private development laptop&#x2F;desktop systems, then I won&#x27;t judge. I understand it is easy to use, has a lot of packages, and has a lot of good documentation. Those are good things.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m a packaging nerd. It&#x27;s a thing I&#x27;m weirdly passionate about (I&#x27;ve contributed patches to yum in the distant past, have been a maintainer of packages for all sorts of operating systems and OSS and commercial projects, and I maintain the package repositories for my company&#x27;s products and projects). I have strong opinions, but they are based on much (much!) more than average experience; over the past two decades I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time building packages (for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.). It may even be the technical area I have spent the most time on, since it&#x27;s been consistent across nearly every company and project I&#x27;ve ever worked for&#x2F;on. Homebrew strikes me as a huge step backward.