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by Tehnix 3916 days ago
Because it has never caused any trouble having it in /usr/local, and as another user said /usr/local/bin is part of the standard path.

Other than this one-liner, which is done once, there really isn't any extra hassle with using the default.

I'd be more interested in why you didn't want to install it there?
3 comments
__david__ 3916 days ago
I installed mine in /usr/local/brew because I already had a ton of stuff in /usr/local managed with GNU stow before brew even existed. I don't have any problems with it.

Someone I know puts it in ~/brew and that works just fine, too. His reasoning is that /usr/local/ is for all users, and though he's really the only user on his laptop, it's just wrong to install a bunch of stuff that's just for him into a global user directory.

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alex1 3916 days ago
Mostly because of my (perhaps irrational) OCD in not wanting to touch global system paths or files, even though under FHS /usr/local is where you're supposed to install manually-managed libraries and binaries. I believe Homebrew likes to have its path owned by you instead of root, so I think it makes more sense to have stuff that's going to be owned by me to be in my home folder rather than /usr/local.
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rbinv 3916 days ago
Actually it sounds like you will need to run this/restore permissions after every future OS X update.
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_jsn 3916 days ago
Right. The OS X image now has to contain a /usr/local directory so that it exists unrestricted after you install the OS (otherwise you would be unable to create it yourself, because /usr is restricted). It has to ship with some permissions, so it rightly ships owned by root. The installer will apply these permissions each time it runs.

Aside: I really wish Homebrew didn't encourage having a single user own /usr/local. If they're going to insist on never needing sudo to install things, it should just default to installing in your home directory.

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Tehnix 3916 days ago
Hmm, having been on El Capitan since the first beta, this hasn't happened. Do you have anywhere it states that?
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rbinv 3916 days ago
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/h...

"Apple documentation hints that /usr/local will be returned to root:wheel restricted permissions on every OS X update; Homebrew will be adding a brew doctor check to warn you when this happens in the near future."

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crazysim 3916 days ago
Perhaps they should consider adding an option to install something into launchd that just does this.
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