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No. Root is the specific user which should do installations. Thus, the "solution" is for Homebrew to stop pretending that password-less binary installs is a "feature" instead of a massive security hole.

Honestly, Homebrew doesn't seem like a reason to either use or not use a Mac. For me personally, (as I mentioned elsewhere), the small amount of unix-y host (i.e. macOS) software I install is available in native Installer packages. The rest I install in Debian VMs.

For those that need/want more unix-y tools at the host level, there are a lot of positive comments about MacPorts in this thread, and it specifically doesn't have the permissions issue that Homebrew has (it requires being run as sudo, as it drops to a special account for compiling, and then later installs as root)

Reply-to-Edits:

> Edit: It seems to be fixed anyway? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12892929

No. You still need to change ownership of /usr/local/bin. The problem isn't fixed, at all.

> Edit: Let user "homebrew" have id 0.

No. That would essentially be the same as running `sudo homebrew`, which they don't support.

It would also mean that packages that need to be compiled will do so as root, not a limited user account as they should be.



OK, thanks. It was a few years since I touched the Mac package managers.

(I ought to ask or go read up on why it is like this, but I'll let it wait a year to when I research the next machine anyway.)

(Edit: Weird to not allow root? Oh, next year. :-) )


You seem to have strong views about the matter. Homebrew is open source after all; why not submit a pull request with the changes that you propose?


> why not submit a pull request with the changes that you propose

I wasn't aware you could submit a pull-request to change the mentality of project leaders.


No better way to do it. Working code or stfu.




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