Homebrew: The Great Linking Adventure
Today we're diving into quite the rollercoaster ride from the Homebrew team! Mike McQuaid led a fascinating journey with a major feature for linking versioned keg-only formulae - a feature that went through the full cycle of implementation, revert, and re-implementation all in one day. Plus we've got some nice developer experience improvements with a new style fixing option and helpful documentation updates.
Duration: PT3M55S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Homebrew.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Homebrew
- Published: 2026-03-07T12:00:09Z
- Audio duration: PT3M55S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, fellow developers! Welcome back to another episode of Homebrew. I'm your host, and wow, do we have a story for you today - March 7th, 2026. Grab your coffee because we're about to dive into one of those development adventures that perfectly captures the reality of shipping software.
So picture this: you're working on a significant feature, you merge it, then discover some regressions, so you revert it, fix the issues, and ship it again - all within about 15 hours. That's exactly what happened with our friends at Homebrew, and honestly? It's a masterclass in how to handle production issues…
Let's start with the main event. Mike McQuaid was working on what seems like a really user-friendly improvement - automatically linking versioned keg-only formulae by default. Think about those packages with version numbers or special suffixes like "at" or "full" variants. The idea was simple: if you don't have the…
This feature touched 13 files with over 500 lines of changes, including comprehensive tests. Mike merged it yesterday evening, and initially everything looked great. But then - and this is where real-world software development gets interesting - they started seeing…
Steve…
But…