Integrate brew cask install into brew install

[yzgyyang]

I did a quick search but didn't find such discussions. Sorry for the noise if it has already been discussed somewhere.

A detailed description of the proposed feature

Make brew install be able to also install casks. (Assuming there doesn't exist such cask whose name is also a brew package)

The motivation for the feature

Currently there is inconsistency and confusion for me when installing cask apps:

• We can only use brew search <name> to search available casks (instead of brew cask search which is deprecated and integrated into brew search).
• We can only use brew cask install <name> to install cask (instead of brew install which comes naturally after the search).

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

Many users use brew cask have to use different commands for cask search and install.

What alternatives to the feature have been considered

To maintain consistency, we can also keep brew cask search as an alias to brew search --casks.

Related:
#4254

[jonchang]

You may also be interested in related discussion in #5456 and a pull request in #5538. I don't think any maintainers have plans to integrate brew install and brew cask install but pull requests similar to the one above would of course be welcome.

[MikeMcQuaid]

Assuming there doesn't exist such cask whose name is also a brew package

There does.

We want to ensure a separation between installing casks and installing formulae as the latter from Homebrew/homebrew-core are open source software. We could consider something that required a user to manually e.g. tap Homebrew/homebrew-cask before this was possible. Happy to keep talking here but it's going to be a fairly complex ask to solve these problems.

[yzgyyang]

We want to ensure a separation between installing casks and installing formulae as the latter from Homebrew/homebrew-core are open source software.

I agree that users should have an awareness of whether they are installing a cask or a formulae, and that is why I personally prefer keeping brew cask install/search/info. However, since the integrations are already happening at brew search/info (per #4254, #5456, #5538 mentioned above), and they are dealing with the exact same challenges that brew install integration will be facing, for example:

#5538 brew 'info' will show info for cask if formula with same name does not exist

So at this point, I would vote for consistency and hope different brew subcommands have similar behaviors dealing with the "formulae vs cask" situation.

[MikeMcQuaid]

I think we need to pass on this I'm afraid; a brew cask install can do so much more than a brew install can do in terms of writing to places on the system that are unexpected. We also have a hard requirement from our foundation that we have a separation between installation of open source and closed source software with our default installation methods. Other commands should be integrated but brew cask install should remain separate.