requesting specific macos-15-intel x86_64 bottles

[mahrud]

I saw the discussion here about winding down support and mass bottling for Intel platforms, but I was wondering if I could request a specific handful of bottles that would be quite helpful to the mathematics community (specifically Macaulay2 users).

We run a tap which hosts Macaulay2 as well as a handful of dependencies that aren't in homebrew-core. As explained in Macaulay2/homebrew-tap#339, for intel sonoma the only bottles we need to make are formulae from our tap, but because GitHub Actions doesn't have a free macos-14-intel runner, we're in the process of setting up a manual bottling operation so we can host those bottle on our GitHub Packages repository.

For intel sequoia and intel tahoe, however, there are 39 homebrew-core bottles that don't have bottles:

bison fmt ada-url brotli c-ares hdrhistogram_c icu4c@78 libnghttp2 libnghttp3 libngtcp2
sphinx-doc libuv llhttp aklomp-base64 simdutf merve nbytes simdjson uvwasi node bdw-gc
boost flint ntl libomp openblas z3 llvm jansson libffi libxml2 mpfi nauty diffutils 
hwloc tbb glpk cddlib msolve

If these bottles are built by homebrew-core, then we can bottle the rest of the dependencies using GitHub Actions free macos-15-intel and macos-26-intel runners.

1. I was wondering if it's possible to request these 39 intel bottles specifically, that would be quite helpful and likely keep us self-sufficient until intel macos are completely discontinued.

2. Alternatively, if there's a hacky workaround that I'm not aware of to build macos-14-intel bottles on macos-15-intel runners or use macos-14-intel bottles as dependencies for bottling on macos-15-intel, that would also help us out.

3. As another option, it would be great if there was a way to bottle a formula and all of its dependencies altogether, then we could make a super-bottle for Macaulay2 on macos-15/26-intel runners that also has all the dependencies built into it.

4. about half of the unbottled dependencies come from node, which is actually just a build dependency. Is there a way to bottle M2 without necessarly bottling node? We can probably remove it if necessary, then the list is just 21 bottles:

bison bdw-gc icu4c@78 boost libomp openblas flint z3 llvm jansson
libffi ntl libxml2 mpfi nauty diffutils hwloc tbb glpk cddlib msolve 

[dimpase]

I'd add gmp (which is a dependency of ones listed above, so just in case).
As well as

ecl pari m4ri suite-sparse emacs cmake meson ninja make autoconf automake m4 

@rgommers - what would you think about this?

[mahrud]

I believe gmp and thus all its dependencies already have intel bottles for all architectures, in particular:

$ brew unbottled --tag=sequoia gmp
==> Populating dependency tree...
==> :sequoia bottle status
gmp: already bottled
$ brew unbottled --tag=tahoe gmp
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/internal/packages.tahoe.jws.json
==> Populating dependency tree...
==> :tahoe bottle status
gmp: already bottled

[MikeMcQuaid]

Sorry, we don't do requests for these. We're 3 months out from macOS Intel entirely being an unsupported platform (https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers) when this situation will rapidly worsen.

A year after that, Homebrew will not even run on macOS Intel. I'd suggest you start planning for that accordingly.

[mahrud]

I understand that in 3 months the situation will worsen, and we will plan for that, but according to that link currently Intel x86_64 macOS Tahoe 26, Sequoia 15, and Sonoma 14 are in Tier 1 support, right? And GitHub Actions still has free intel runners for Tahoe and Sequoia at least. And Tier 1 explicitly states:

full CI coverage for testing and bottle builds

[p-linnane]

You're right that Intel x86_64 Sonoma, Sequoia, and Tahoe are all currently Tier 1. That part holds. The piece worth clarifying is what "full CI coverage for bottle builds" actually means.

We don't bottle on GitHub's free runners. Bottles are built on our own hardened infrastructure, which has limited capacity, and we don't build per-version Intel bottles when a macOS 14 (Sonoma) bottle already covers it. The vast majority of Sonoma x86_64 bottles are used as-is on 15 and 26, so those formulae are covered for Intel. They just don't each carry a Sequoia- or Tahoe-specific bottle. Per-version Intel bottles only get built where a formula genuinely needs one (pkgconf, gcc, etc.).

So "Tier 1 = full CI coverage" is satisfied by that Sonoma build serving the newer versions, not by a distinct bottle per OS release.

[mahrud]

That makes sense, thank you!

The vast majority of Sonoma x86_64 bottles are used as-is on 15 and 26, so those formulae are covered for Intel. They just don't each carry a Sequoia- or Tahoe-specific bottle.

This was my vague understanding, and we definitely don't specifically need Sequoia- or Tahoe-specific bottles. Do you know if there's even kludgy or hacky way to build a Sonoma bottle on macos-15/26-intel runners, or build a Tahoe/Sequoia bottle using the Sonoma bottles for its dependencies?

[MikeMcQuaid]

Do you know if there's even kludgy or hacky way to build a Sonoma bottle on macos-15/26-intel runners, or build a Tahoe/Sequoia bottle using the Sonoma bottles for its dependencies?

Maybe but we don't provide any support or docs for this. You'd need to figure it out yourself, sorry 😭