Why is qmk-toolbox tagged as deprecated in Homebrew?

[qns7]

... and what's the alternative if that's not a mistake?
Best regards Q

formulae.brew.sh/cask/qmk-toolbox

[fauxpark]

The Toolbox currently is not signed. Our previous attempt had to be reverted since the GitHub action we were using as part of the workflow was deleted... the author nuked their account for some reason.

Even if we do get it working again, there are probably going to be issues due to how the Toolbox works.

The actual flashing is not done by the Toolbox itself; it simply calls separate flashing tools bundled with it. On macOS these binaries (and their dependencies) are taken directly from the Homebrew bottles. This is done so we know they've come from somewhere reputable (vs random GitHub users trying to be helpful by PRing binaries from who knows where). Thus any support for a new flashing method in Toolbox requires it to be in Homebrew first.

At the moment the Toolbox is built as a universal binary (so it at least runs on Apple Silicon), but the flashing tools that come with it are still Intel-only, so you need Rosetta 2 installed to actually use them. Homebrew provides bottles for Intel and Apple Silicon separately, merging them together would have to be done manually. I tried to get this working a while back but the signing on the ARM binaries had to be stripped or they would just crash, probably because some tweaking is necessary.

It would be preferable to have the Toolbox cask directly depend on the formulae - seems like that may be possible per the Caskfile documentation. However this would prevent it being installed standalone, so I'm not sure how good of a solution this would really be.