Samuel Axon
The popular Mac tool Homebrew has long been used by developers and others for package management on macOS, but as we regretted in our first M1 Mac review, it did not support Apple Silicon when Apple’s new Macs launched last year for the first time. has not been introduced. Now, with the release of Homebrew 3.0.0, this is no longer the case: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon, though not with every package.
The volunteer Homebrew team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog next to today’s release. Although the original support is not yet comprehensive, it significantly bridges the gap, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they are not yet able to do, while originally running on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says, “We welcome your help” in providing bottles for all packages moving forward.
Here is the full point on Apple Silicon in the release notes of Homebrew 3.0.0:
Apple Silicon is now officially supported for installations in / opt / homebrew. formula pages.brew.sh formula pages indicate for which platforms bottles (binary packages) are provided and therefore whether they are supported by Homebrew. Homebrew does not (yet) provide bottles for all Apple Silicon packages we do on Intel x86_64, but we welcome your help in doing so. Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon still provides support for Intel x86_64 in / usr / local.
Aside from the inability to run Windows originally, the lack of Homebrew was one of the small number of issues we faced with the Apple Silicon Macs when we reviewed it, and some of our editors cited it as the main reason why they had likes the move to Apple Silicon. Some other users probably share the sentiment, although most macOS users obviously never use such tools.
In celebration of the update, the Homebrew team “especially thanked” MacStadium and Apple. In the blog post, it is specifically noted that Apple provided Apple Silicon hardware to the team to do the job, and thanks “Cassidy of Apple for helping us with this migration in many ways.”
Other important changes since the previous version of Homebrew, 2.7.0, appear in the blog post as follows:
- brew bottles and bottle blocks use a new syntax format (one: cellar per platform). brew-style –fix will automatically correct formulas in this new format. This allows more bottles to be relocated.
- With the new HOMEBREW_BOOTSNAP environment variable, the Bootsnap gem can be used to speed up repeated brewing calls. It does not (yet) work on Apple Silicon or the use of Homebrew’s portable Ruby.
- Several methods were rejected, eliminated and removed
- Bash, fish and zsh completions are automatically generated from the CLI :: Parser DSL. This will ensure that they are kept informed.
- brew update handles better current consumption in branches (eg from master to head)
- brew completions are a new assignment to join completions offered by third-party taps