Support HOMEBREW_GREEDY or variants

[mvshmakov]

Verification

• This issue's title and/or description do not reference a single formula e.g. brew install wget. If they do, open an issue at https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/new/choose instead.

Provide a detailed description of the proposed feature

Would be nice if Homebrew supported the following env variables:

• HOMEBREW_GREEDY
• HOMEBREW_GREEDY_LATEST
• HOMEBREW_GREEDY_AUTO_UPDATES

When set, the commands that accept respected flags (--greedy, --greedy-latest, and --greedy-auto-updates) should behave as this flag was set even if it wasn't. Would be nice if brew autoupdate start will also support it.

What is the motivation for the feature?

I'm used to running brew upgrade --greedy all the time, and it seems like there is no environment variable to set this flag by default.

How will the feature be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users?

This feature is relevant for everyone who is always using --greedy and embeds it in the custom shell functions (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub).

What alternatives to the feature have been considered?

The alternative is already implemented – --greedy flag and friends, but it is not really convenient to type it every upgrade.

Also, any other variable names with the same functionality would also be appreciated.

[reitermarkus]

Back when this was introduced I was already arguing that --greedy should be the default behaviour, since I want versions to be controlled by Homebrew rather than apps themselves, so I agree there should be a variable for always enabling this.

[apainintheneck]

I think that it probably makes sense to just start with HOMEBREW_GREEDY at least initially. We can add the other ones later on if people want them but I don't know if there'd be much interest to be honest.

[reitermarkus]

Yeah, I don't think we need all variants. The vast majority of casks are also versioned now, so --greedy-latest isn't as impactful.

[carlocab]

Or we can just use HOMEBREW_GREEDY for all of that:

• to use --greedy-latest, set HOMEBREW_GREEDY=latest
• to use --greedy-autoupdates, set HOMEBREW_GREEDY=autoupdates
• to use both --greedy-latest and --greedy-autoupdate, set HOMEBREW_GREEDY=latest,autoupdates or HOMEBREW_GREEDY=autoupdates,latest
• to use --greedy, set HOMEBREW_GREEDY=1 (or to any other non-empty string not used in the above cases)

[MikeMcQuaid]

I think that it probably makes sense to just start with HOMEBREW_GREEDY at least initially. We can add the other ones later on if people want them but I don't know if there'd be much interest to be honest.

Agreed. I'd be 👍🏻 to have just this implemented for now.

[bevanjkay]

Personally I run --greedy-auto-updates 90% of the time and then do an occasional run with --greedy.

The biggest difference for me is that --greedy|--greedy-latest now downloads the binaries to compare the shasums when the version of the cask is :latest. So at least for my list of installed casks, running brew outdated or upgrade with --greedy is considerably heavier on network resources than --greedy-auto-updates.

I wouldn't use the environment variable myself, as I have shell commands to handle these, but just wanted to mention the extra network usage for --greedy.