Acceptable Formula
Some formula should not go in mxcl/master. But there are alternative forks for alternative formula. See Interesting Taps & Branches.
THIS SECTION IS A LITTLE OUT OF DATE BECAUSE NOW WE HAVE A HOMEBREW/DUPES TAP. SO WE LIKE DUPES BETTER NOW! SUBMIT THEM THERE!
The mxcl fork doesn’t dupe stuff that comes with OS X or stuff that is provided by RubyGems, CPAN or PyPi. There are good reasons for this:
1. Duplicate libraries regularly break builds
2. Subtle bugs emerge with duplicate libraries, and to a lesser extent, duplicate tools
3. We want you to try harder to make your formula work with what OS X comes with
There are exceptions. Mainly for stuff that is very well designed to be installed in parallel to other versions of itself or for stuff that people really need:
| Ruby | People need version 1.9 |
| Python | People need version 2.7 and 3.1 |
| Bash | Version 4 is cool |
| Subversion | For some tasks Homebrew requires a newer version than OS X 10.5 provides |
| Zsh | This was a mistake, but it’s a bit late to remove it |
| libcurl | Some formulae require a newer version than OS X 10.5 provides |
| openssl | Some formulae require a newer version than OS X 10.5 provides |
| libxml2 | The version that is bundled with OS X has some notable crash bugs |
| cairo | Cairo is not provided by OS X 10.5, and some formulae require a newer version on 10.6 as well |
If you find other dupes they should be reported and removed.
Will your formula be exempted? Possibly. Submit and justify it.
We’re hoping other people will maintain forks that contain dupes. Many duplicates have found a home at the Homebrew-alt repository.
Eg. recently we removed the formula for npm. We worked with the maintainer of npm to do this. It was the best decision for npm and Homebrew.
First check that eg. rubygems doesn’t provide the bindings already.
If not, then put bindings in the formula they bind to. This is more useful to people. Just install the stuff! Having to faff around with foo-ruby foo-perl etc. sucks.
The software in question must be 1) maintained 2) known 3) used and 4) have a homepage.
We will reject formulae that seem too obscure, partly because they won’t get maintained and partly because we have to draw the line somewhere.
We generally frown on authors submitting their own work unless it is suitably notable.
Don’t forget Homebrew is all git underneath! Maintain your own fork if you have to!
Don’t make your formula build a .app, we don’t want those things in Homebrew. Make it build a command line tool.