Linuxbrew Updates

[sjackman]

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[sjackman]

brew update will now migrate your legacy Linuxbrew installation to the new split repository.

[rwhogg]

Installing formulae that depend on X11 (depends_on :x11 in Ruby) will now automatically install the X.Org client libraries for you. That means you can now install X11 applications from Linuxbrew without depending on host libraries! (You still need a host X server, at least for now).

I've also bottled all of the default X11 dependencies to save you all the effort of compiling it yourself.

Big thanks to @maxim-belkin for packaging up the X11 libraries (available from https://github.com/linuxbrew/homebrew-xorg) and to @sjackman for helping me into the Homebrew/Linuxbrew community.

Note that there are still some outstanding issues related to using GTK+ and qt on Linuxbrew, but one step at a time 😸 ✖️

[rwhogg]

Linuxbrew can now install its own copy of Ruby 2.0 if your host system does not include Ruby 2.0. Support for Ruby 1.8 has been dropped from Linuxbrew. If you're using Linuxbrew on a system with a Ruby version < 2.0, no need to worry: Ruby 2.0 will be installed by brew update. This installation of Ruby 2.0 is designed for portability, thanks to the work of xu-cheng, so it works even if you're on an older distro.

[rwhogg]

QT 5 has been fixed for Linuxbrew! A precompiled bottle is now available for it.

This will greatly improve the potential for GUI application distribution through Linuxbrew and is the result of much hard work by myself, the other Linuxbrew maintainers, and some external contributors. Particular credit goes to @donbright for fixing a major issue with the QT 5 build.

[rwhogg]

Happy new year, Linuxbrew users!

2016 was an exciting year, with lots of changes to Linuxbrew that make it a more Linux-friendly, out-of-the-box compatible, and all-around great package manager.

• As Homebrew itself did, we split Linuxbrew into two repos: one for the package manager itself (brew) and another for the list of "core" formulae (homebrew-core), retaining the Git history of both along the way. Huge kudos to Shaun Jackman for this work and to the upstream Homebrew developers who did the same for themselves.

• We moved to our own GitHub organization, which enables us to create our own repositories much more freely.

• Homebrew announced a plan to support Linux at the brew level, albeit not at the core formula level (i.e. Homebrew/brew supports Linux, Homebrew/homebrew-core does not). Huge credit to Mike McQuaid for creating an abstraction layer that isolates Mac-specific and Linux-specific differences - it's cleaner and easier to maintain than Linuxbrew's code. (To be clear, we still recommend using Linuxbrew/brew for now)

• We added 3 new maintainers: myself, Piotr Gaczkowski, and Maxim Belkin.

• We fixed a huge number of missing dependencies in low-level packages. Piotr in particular deserves a lot of credit for this work.

• We packaged the X.Org client libraries and related formulae like Wayland in the new homebrew-xorg tap. Massive props to Maxim for this effort.

• We fixed the GTK+ and Qt formulae, with GTK+3 just around the corner. Qt 5 has been an especially tricky formula to work with, but thanks to a massive effort from both inside and outside the maintainer circle we were able to greatly improve support for it.

• LLVM support has seen substantial improvements. Much credit both to Maxim and to various PR submitters and bug reporters from outside the maintainer circle for all the effort.

• We moved to a stable release model, with each release based on a stable release of upstream Homebrew plus our patches.

What we'd like to accomplish in 2017:

• Start using Homebrew/brew as-is by the end of the year. This will be a big undertaking, but also a very exciting one.

• Add more maintainers 😸

• Migrate the default GCC to GCC 6. (We will likely upgrade to GCC 5.4 before tackling GCC 6)

• Build precompiled bottles for many more formulae.

• Provide Docker images combining major distros with Linuxbrew for easy usage. A Dockerfile based on Ubuntu 16.04 is already available from https://github.com/linuxbrew/docker, although it currently has to be built manually. We also hope to provide images for Debian and CentOS, among others. A Docker image based on Ubuntu 14 is currently available from Docker Hub: docker run -it linuxbrew/linuxbrew

Big thanks to everyone who submitted PR's or bug reports over the last year.

[sjackman]

🍾 Please welcome Jonathan Chang (@jonchang), the newest member of the Linuxbrew team of maintainers! Jon is "an evolutionary biologist whose research involves understanding the origin and maintenance of biological diversity".

[sjackman]

🎉 Linuxbrew 1.1.11 has been released!
The default build environment for Linuxbrew is now --env=super! Superenv intercepts calls to the compiler by adding to the PATH a shell script named cc, which then calls the real compiler with the compiler options needed for that particular formula, like include and library paths. The previous standard build environment passes compiler options to the build tool using command line options and environment variables. The old standard build environment can be invoked using --env=std.

[sjackman]

🍾 Please welcome Michka Popoff (@iMichka), the newest member of the Linuxbrew team of maintainers! Michka develops software for atomic force microscopes, and he also helps maintain Homebrew/science.