Homebrew Cask Review

50 8

Review of Homebrew Cask powered by the Slant community.

Cask extends Homebrew by adding management of graphical applications.

SpecsUpdate

requires sudono

packages4051

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

What are the best Mac package managers?

Pros

Pro
Extends Homebrew

Homebrew Cask adds functionality to Homebrew such as allowing downloads of commercial licensed apps.

Pro
Active project

The project is very active, with commits almost daily and plenty of conversation in issues. This means that the app will see bugs fixed and possibly new features added.

Pro
Manage graphical applications through the command line

Homebrew Cask allows you to install graphical applications through the command line, rather than having to go through the standard installation process.

E.g. brew cask install google-chrome

Cons

Con
Software no longer needed by anything (orphans) is hard to delete

Con
Requires Xcode

Homebrew Cask requires that Xcode is installed, which may be more work than what some want to spend on configuring this app.

Con
Silently spies on the user by default

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720

Con
The developers are hostile to the users reporting issues

Con
Duplicate apps found in brew may cause issue

There are warnings provided that apps found in brew should not be installed with brew cask (and vice versa). While the user is warned of this, mistakes can happen, which would be better to just see them avoided all together by not supplying duplicate apps.