Homebrew Cask Review

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Review of Homebrew Cask powered by the Slant community.

Cask extends Homebrew by adding management of graphical applications.

SpecsUpdate

packages4051

requires sudono

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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
"Zap" application configuration

this is an interesting feature allowing user to remove application configuration leftowers

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
Cask update is usually manual

This defeats the purpose of the packet manager.

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

Con
The developers are hostile to the users reporting issues

Con
Silently spies on the user by default

See here.

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.