Samuel Axon
The popular Mac Homebrew tool has long been used by developers and others for package management on macOS, but, as we regret in our first review of the M1 Mac, it did not support the Apple Silicon when the new Apple Macs were released last year. past. Now, with the release of Homebrew 3.0.0, this is no longer the case: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon natively, although not with all packages.
The Homebrew volunteer team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog along with today’s launch. Although native support is not yet comprehensive, it bridges the gap significantly, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they cannot yet run natively on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says “we appreciate your help” in providing bottles for all future packages.
Here is the full point about Apple Silicon in the Homebrew 3.0.0 release notes:
Apple Silicon now has official support for installations in / opt / homebrew. formulae.brew.sh formula pages indicate which bottle platforms (binary packages) are provided for and therefore whether they are supported by Homebrew. Homebrew does not (yet) provide bottles for all Apple Silicon packages that we offer on Intel x86_64, but we appreciate your help. Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon still provides support for Intel x86_64 in / usr / local.
In addition to the inability to run Windows natively, the lack of Homebrew was one of the few problems for which we removed Apple’s Silicon Macs when we analyzed them, and some of our editors pointed this out as the number one reason they have avoided moving to Apple Silicon. Some other users probably share the same sentiment, although most macOS users never use tools like this, of course.
In celebrating the update, the Homebrew team gave “special thanks” to MacStadium and Apple. Specifically, the blog post notes that Apple provided the team with Apple Silicon hardware to do the job and thanks “Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration.”
Other important changes since the previous version of Homebrew, 2.7.0, are listed in the blog post as follows:
- the beer bottle and bottle making blocks use a new syntax format (one: cellar by platform). brew style –fix will automatically correct formulas for this new format. This will allow more bottles to be relocated.
- The new HOMEBREW_BOOTSNAP environment variable allows the use of the Bootsnap yolk to speed up repeated beer calls. This does not (yet) work on Apple Silicon or using Homebrew’s portable Ruby.
- Several methods have been discontinued, disabled and removed
- The conclusions Bash, fish and zsh are generated automatically from the CLI :: Parser DSL. This will ensure that they are kept up to date.
- brew update handles better upstream branch renames (for example, from master to main)
- fermentation conclusions is a new command to accept conclusions provided by third-party taps