Homebrew: Cleanup Gets Smarter
Today we're diving into two fantastic pull requests that make Homebrew more reliable and user-friendly. Rex Hall contributed a brilliant fix that prevents cleanup from promising to remove packages it actually can't touch, while Bo98 tackled some tricky deprecation issues with bottle loading. Plus, we've got some nice consistency improvements in our bump command messaging.
Duration: PT3M53S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Homebrew.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Homebrew
- Published: 2026-03-12T10:16:46Z
- Audio duration: PT3M53S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, developers! Welcome back to another episode of Homebrew - I'm your host, and wow, do we have some satisfying fixes to talk about today, March 12th, 2026. You know those annoying little bugs that make you go "why does it say it's going to do something and then... doesn't?" Well, today's changes are all…
Let's jump right into our main story with pull request 21719 from rexmhall09. This one's called "Respect installed dependents during autoremove" and honestly, it's one of those fixes that makes you wonder how we lived without it. Here's the scenario - you run brew cleanup with the autoremove flag, and it cheerfully…
Rex saw this frustration - it was actually linked to issue 13729 that's been hanging around - and decided to do something about it. The solution is beautifully simple: add a safety check that filters out any formulae that uninstall will refuse to remove due to installed dependents. It's only 33 lines of changes…
Our second merged PR comes from Bo98, and this one's a bit more technical but equally important for keeping things running smoothly. It's called "formulary: soften deprecation errors from FromBottleLoader" - and if you've ever dealt with the headaches…
Her…