Being broken is a feature? Changing /usr/local instead of being sane? Leaving old versions of packages lying about instead of cleaning them up? Breaking when the Apple devs wonder if it would be fun to switch things up a bit under the hood without telling anyone?
The one thing I can think of that's a "feature" is that brew compiles locally, instead of pulling down a binary, but even that has some draw backs.
I'm all for product loyalty, but a spade's a spade.
What exactly is wrong with writing to /usr/local? It seems to fall in line with the FHS standard, at least as far as I can tell.
Sometimes older versions of different packages may be dependencies of newer packages. This is a thing that happens with software. When it's not a problem, `brew cleanup` gets rid of old versions.
Most of the time brew does install binaries, they're called Bottles. When it can't find a binary, it compiles locally. Yes this is sometimes annoying but it's not a deal breaker, at least not for me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Breaking when the Apple devs wonder if it would be fun to switch things up a bit under the hood without telling anyone." This has never happened to me or anyone I know and furthermore Brew is a Unix compliant tool and OS X is a SUS compliant operating system.
Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, it just sounds a little like you're a Linux user who doesn't or possibly hasn't ever used OS X. Brew is not a panacea but it's honestly pretty good. There's also MacPorts if you're used to more old-style tools and a couple other package managers as well. You can even use Nix on OS X.
Better than most OS X programs, which seem to have paths like /Applications/Something.app/Contents/Resources/SomethingElse.app/Contents/Developer/Frameworks/Resources/Something.dylib/Contents/Resources/MacOS/Resources/Frameworks/Something.dylib/Contents/Developer
Case in point, an excerpt from the program Lipo's usage text:
I'm not understanding what is "insane" about installing to /usr/local/Cellar and dropping a symlink in /usr/local/bin. This is the convention on OS X. All tools I have ever seen install to /usr/local.
