Possible to blacklist packages?

[mathomp4]

I was wondering if it's possible with brew to "blacklist" packages? The main reason I ask is that I do code development on my Macbook and I like to control my compilers by building them myself and maintaining Lua modules to enable them.

Thus, I tend to be very careful and never let brew install gcc since I want to maintain that myself and make sure it's not in my "default" path (which has the brew bin). I have to live with clang being in my default PATH, but gcc only appears when I ask it to.

But the fun part is when I do a brew install foo and find it wants gcc and boom, I now have gcc-11 or whatever in my path. I try to look at brew info foo first, but sometimes I see a cool new package and get impatient. 😄

So I wondered, is there a way to tell brew "never install gcc or any package that depends on it"? I don't mind losing out on some packages if it means I can keep my control.

[SMillerDev]

You could just install it and brew unlink gcc, that way it won't show up in your path.

[mathomp4]

Hmm. I hadn't thought of that...

[pan3793]

You could just install it and brew unlink gcc, that way it won't show up in your path.

This is a workaround, we still need to install the unused deps and upgrade them when run brew upgrade. Is there any concerns to add a blacklist feature?

[micolous]

If there was a way to tell Homebrew to unlink the package automatically (ie: even after upgrades), then it would allow any formula which depended on it to build with the Homebrew version, while not affecting things outside of Homebrew.

[pan3793]

I'm also looking forward to this feature, lots of Java softwares have been declared depend on openjdk, but most of them can not work with the latest version of openjdk, e.g. Homebrew/homebrew-core#98294

[agenslerDNA]

I also would love to see this feature. I'm running into the exact same type of scenarios. I find myself having to fix my environment more and more, so a way to blacklist would be a great QOL addition.

[SMillerDev]

Alternatively, submitting pull requests to ensure the tests for formulae actually catch the version issues in CI make the Homebrew packages better for everyone.

[iesahin]

This is also common for Rust especially when certain code requires nightly and I switch release channels use rustup. Brew installs the stable, rustup installs nightly and when a crate requires nightly, Brew's Rust interferes to compile. If you forget to uninstall/unlink Brew's Rust, you get weird errors, especially for beginners.

There must be a way to tell "I already have this package, please don't install and go on assuming you have" to Brew.

[SMillerDev]

There is not, because brew can only know about packages it installed. It sounds like you'd be better off just using rustup to manage your rust install