Homebrew 4.0.0

From the brew devs' point of view it doesn't make sense because they are different commands.

From the end user's point of view it makes perfect sense because brew is just a tool to install shit with and they do not wish to expend any brain cycles on it. That includes remembering whether this particular tool calls it update or upgrade.

You know the second point of view is right because if you type one without arguments, it asks you whether you meant to type the other one.

But they're too autistic to realize what that means and actually fix the interface.

    brew update - update brew
    brew update thing - update thing

Similarly, as someone who only rarely uses it, a huge frustration is that when I do, it invariably wants to update 100+ packages. I never asked for it to do that and I was happy with whatever was installed right before it decided to do that and block my system for 20 minutes.

Again, brew devs do not understand their audience.

Either way, I think bad default folders is better than bad default security practices. Most package manager forces you to use sudo to run them as root, and I think that's much much worse in terms of security practices and encourages the wrong behaviors and potentially allowing build/install scripts to wreck havoc on your system. (Note that /opt/homebrew is not world writable as you suggested. It's only writable by the user)

Instead, Homebrew prefers to run in a user account, default to yours. If you have a multi-user computer, you can install Homebrew to a local user folder to have isolation and not using a global location like /opt/homebrew, or you can make a special Homebrew user account (rather than using root), which is what the docs suggest (https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-does-homebrew-say-sudo-is-bad).

I don't think the current solution is perfect, but I do think the motivation to prevent usage of sudo is correct in terms of security. In fact, I would argue that the other package managers that use sudo are taking the easy way out (albeit insecure).

So im getting flagged here for using a word as it is supposed to be.

Way to go for censorship and suppressing opinions then, since i am pointing out a valid criticism of the homebrew project.

Using a tool-specific system (e.g. nvm), or Docker, or a VM, is far better for reproducibility. Homebrew's better for installing things you're going to use directly, yourself. Like, don't use it to install Postgres system-wide if you need it for some rails "app"—you'll just run into pain the first time you have to git-bisect or go back and fix some older deployed branch and that version was running on some earlier version of Postgres, or the first time you want to work on a second project that relies on a different version.

That's not just a Homebrew thing, the same problem applies, to, say, Debian and dpkg—don't use those to install project deps, unless you're very sure those deps will always be "whatever's available from Debian today".

Homebrew's great for installing your tools. It's not good for project deps. Again, that's far from being just a Homebrew problem.