[pilif]

you don't need to. You only need to if you have manually deleted /usr/local for some reason. /usr/local is exempt from system integrity protection.

The only problem is that its owner gets reset to root on every OS update, whereas Homebrew wants its owner to be the Homebrew user.

The advantage of /usr/local as the installation root is that /usr/local/bin is in the default PATH of the OS and that setting the PATH in a way that it takes effect no matter what starts an application is a bit... tricky in OSX as there are many ways to launch an application that doesn't go through a shell, so .profile and friends aren't enough.

[Tehnix]

Are you sure it gets reset to root? I've been on since the first public beta, quickly fixed the homebrew problem, and haven't had any permission issues since. Admittedly I can't say if normal updates will behave different from the beta ones.

[pilif]

I can't be sure obviously, but if it's done once by the installer, there's no reason to assume it won't ever do it again. So in the worst case, you'll have to re-chown every time you install an update.

Or you don't chown and run brew as root.

[rsy96]

But I've found that many GUI applications do not take /usr/local/bin into account. It's like only terminal applications, which are rightly affected by terminal environments, care about it.