I have very mixed feelings about homebrew. When it works, it is awesome, but when it doesn't it can be a serious nightmare. In particular, homebrew refuses to run under sudo. Instead, to instal in /usr/local it wants me to recursively chown /usr/local to myself, which is a Really Bad Idea (tm). I have mostly stopped using it for this reason. I understand that running a program that runs third-party scripts under sudo…
I have the same concerns and have been using Nix for my Mac package manager [1] instead. Functionally it's far better, though with far fewer packages available currently. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772686
I did a fresh install of macOS with Sierra and decided to use Nix instead of Homebrew this time around. So far I've only started reading through the docs and only have a few things installed; git, vim, tmux. What are your thoughts about using it as a Homebrew alternative?
I've been using Homebrew for years and have been a huge fan so far. I often look at formulas when trying to build things from scratch on Linux.