Homebrew: The Great Revert-Revert Victory
Today we're celebrating a big win for Homebrew as Mike McQuaid successfully lands the keg-only formulae linking improvement on the second try, plus we've got some nice quality-of-life fixes including better user feedback and artifact selection improvements. It's a perfect example of how persistence and iteration make for better software.
Duration: PT3M42S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Homebrew.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Homebrew
- Published: 2026-03-08T10:15:13Z
- Audio duration: PT3M42S
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 I'm genuinely excited to dive into what's been happening in the Homebrew world this March 8th, 2026.
You know what I love about open source? Sometimes the most interesting stories aren't about the flashy new features - they're about persistence, iteration, and getting things right. And boy, do we have a great example of that today!
Let's start with the star of the show - Mike McQuaid just landed a really significant change that has quite the backstory. We're talking about PR 21684, with the delightfully recursive title "Revert Revert Link versioned keg-only formulae by default." I know, I know - that sounds like a tongue twister, but here's…
Mike originally tried to improve how Homebrew handles versioned keg-only formulae - basically making them link by default, which is a huge quality-of-life improvement for users. But sometimes even the best ideas hit unexpected snags, so they had to revert it. Now, this is where it gets good - instead of giving up,…
We're talking about 600 lines of additions across 13 files, with solid test coverage - 210 new lines in the formula installer specs alone!…
No…