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> I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update

I definitely have thought something along those lines (mostly when I go to install a small tool, and get hit with 20 minutes of auto-updates first).

Pretty sure I also will not be adopting this particular solution, however



I've never thought "only 2 seconds faster" - I've certainly thought "why is this taking half the time it takes Gentoo to recompile an entire server".


But you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.

I agree it’s annoying, but I haven’t turned it off because it’s only annoying because I’m not keeping my computer (brew packages) up-to-date normally (aka, it’s my own fault).


I'd be much happier if it were on a background job, than arbitrarily running when I invoke a command


I've started using https://github.com/DomT4/homebrew-autoupdate recently, which has been great.


Terrible default behavior is a great reason to abandon a software package.


I'm not sure if I just have way fewer things installed than most people or I just update more often, but I haven't experienced anything like this for years. I run `brew upgrade` probably around once every (work)day, usually right before doing a git pull or something, and then I'll quickly look at a couple emails or slack messages, and then it's always done by the time I switch back


What? Why are you running brew upgrade every day?


To upgrade my packages? I'm not sure I understand the question. That's how I use pretty much all of my systems that have package managers.


But why do you want daily upgrades? Most of us want to wait a little while for the bugs to be worked out of fresh releases. And hey, if everything is working today... why would I want to risk potential breaking changes?


I don't recall ever having something break from upgrading it in homebrew, but I do recall having issues in the past from having things outdated without realizing it (usually stuff that wasn't getting upgraded by my package manager, e.g. VS Code being months out of date without me realizing and therefore not working with an extension the company I was working at had developed).

On the average day, I get maybe two or three package upgrades from it. Sometimes, they're packages that I'm extremely grateful to have updates for immediately (like rust-analyzer), and other times they're things that I don't use very often (or don't use directly), so I wouldn't likely remember to upgrade them at all if I didn't make a habit of it.

> Most of us want to wait a little while for the bugs to be worked out of fresh releases. And hey, if everything is working today... why would I want to risk potential breaking changes?

I felt like I was pretty clear in my original comment that I didn't know whether other people upgraded as often as me or not. That being said, it does sound like you've been having an experience you're unhappy with, and I'm not, so I'm not sure why you're so confident that the way I'm using it is weird. It's very possible that it would not end up being something you or others are happy with, but it's more weird to me that you think this is such a huge deal when it seems like the most obvious way in the world to use a package manager to me.


> Most of us want to wait a little while for the bugs to be worked out of fresh releases.

This is not something that's solved by updating less frequently though. It would be solved by a 'minimum age' setting, but `brew` aren't planning on implementing that, with arguably valid reasoning: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/21421


> It would be solved by a 'minimum age' setting

Minimum age solves a related problem - it gives maintainers some margin of time in which to discover vulnerabilities and yank the affected versions.

However, minimum age also delays you getting bug fixes (since those also need to age out).

In an ideal world one would probably be able to configure a minimum-age-or-subsequent-patch-count rule. i.e. don't adopt new major/minor package versions until either 1 month has elapsed, or a minimum of 2 patch versions have been released for that version.


FWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving




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