install --fresh

[NikolausDemmel]

I'm not sure what the purpose of --fresh is? The man page suggests that the sequence brew install foo --with-bar; brew remove foo; brew install foo will result in foo being installed with bar enabled. However it seems this does not work, tough (I can provide a test case if this is indeed buggy behaviour). So is install broken, or --fresh useless, or something else entirely?

[jacknagel]

--fresh is only useful for a very specific set of circumstances; it maybe shouldn't even be documented.

brew install foo --with-bar; brew remove foo; brew install foo

can't preserve --with-bar, because the install receipt is removed during brew remove.

--fresh is only useful if you do something like

$ brew install foo --with-bar
# some time passes, a new version of foo is available
$ brew unlink foo
$ brew install foo --fresh # --with-bar is not preserved

[NikolausDemmel]

Ah ok, that makes sense. Having it documented is fine IMO, however the current doc is a little bit misleading.