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Showing posts from January, 2019

How to Keep HomeBrew Clean on a Mac

HomeBrew is a package manager (similar to the linux "apt-get"/"zypper"/"yum" front end package managers that are usually shipped with different distros) with one exception: it was built for Apple MacOS systems as a solution since Apple doesn't offer or ship one with MacOS. Dependencies While HomeBrew is a great solution and offers most features other modern package managers offer and has a rich reposatory, it lacks some useful features that make it difficult to use for the purpose of managing installed packages. One issue that I would like to describe here is the lack automatic removal of dependencies. HomeBrew does not keep logs of installed dependencies the same way that the popular Linux package managers do. Some packages require dependencies to work and while HomeBrew can detect the required dependencies and install them automatically as part of the installation process, it will not remove them automatically while removing packages. This