FAQ

How do I contribute to Homebrew?

See the Formula Cookbook.

bad interpreter: /usr/bin/ruby^M: no such file or directory

You cloned with git, and git is set to use Windows line endings. Don’t do that.

Macports sucks because it takes so long to compile everything, why are you doing that?

Well, because we don’t duplicate all the stuff that OS X already installs (eg openssl, libz, libxml), generally you will compile an awful lot less stuff with Homebrew. So then it just becomes convenient because you can decide how the software builds. Open Source software is meant to be built from source, it comes with all sorts of options. Binary packages take away your choices.

How about Gentoo Prefix?

Gentoo Prefix seems pretty cool, but it isn’t optimised specfically for Mac users and it duplicates worse than MacPorts, including gcc and all that jazz. Otherwise I’d use it.

How do I get a formula from someone else’s branch?

gem install github
github pull someone_else