Symlinked standard location /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew being ignored when installing non-relocatible bottles

[Char-Aznable]

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• Confirmed this is a problem with running a brew command and not brew installing or the post-install behaviour of one or more formulae? If it's a formulae-specific problem please file this issue at the relevant tap e.g. for Linuxbrew/homebrew-core https://github.com/Linuxbrew/homebrew-core/issues/new
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My linuxbrew is installed in /scratch/.linuxbrew and I create a symlink /home/linuxbrew -> /scratch in order to install the non-relocatible bottles. However, I find recently that I have to --force-bottle to install them and this option is not passed down the dependency chain so that I have to manually pass --force-bottle to every single install. For example:

==> Installing iso-codes dependency: ncurses
Warning: Building ncurses from source:
  The bottle needs a /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar Cellar (yours is /scratch/.linuxbrew/Cellar).

Somehow linuxbrew ignores the /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew path as if the symlink is followed. Is there a way to relax this path check so that it's OK even if the standard location is a symlink? Or is there a way to force bottle to be installed in a dependency tree?

[sjackman]

Symlinking HOMEBREW_PREFIX in this way is not supported. It mostly works, but a couple of formula break, in particular python and python3. Those are in fact the only two that I've encountered to break. Here's a hack that I use to use Homebrew on macOS with a symlinked Cellar. sjackman/brew@6a97bf5
You could adapt this for Linuxbrew by changing /usr/local to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew, and changing it to look for a PREFIX symlink rather than a CELLAR symlink. For example, get rid of the if statement and add

HOMEBREW_CELLAR="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar"

Good luck!

[Char-Aznable]

What did you mean when you said the python was broken by symlinking this way? Why not incorporate the hack you mentioned into the codes? I think a lot of people can benefit from this because symlinking this way might be the only solution when one doesn't have permission to the hard-coded prefix, which I believe is the main reason why people choose to use linuxbrew in the first place.

[sjackman]

brew postinstall python fails because a symlink to site-library is incorrect. I haven't had time to look into the issue. If it were fixed, the above hack could possible be incorporated into Linuxbrew.