[jeroenhd]

> and couldn't upgrade because Apple didn't support my hardware anymore

I'd classify that as an Apple problem rather than a Homebrew problem. If Apple themselves cannot be arsed to support an OS version, why would a volunteer project take on such a challenge?

For every piece of software I've fetched using Homebrew, there's a "compile from source" option available on Github or some other source repo.

[spockz]

And if there isn’t that option explicitly highlighted, one can always look at the formula in homebrew for the instructions.

[trinix912]

It wouldn’t cost Homebrew folks much to add a flag to skip dependency version checking which would solve most issues with using older macOS. But they don’t want to, and have closed all issues asking for it as wontfix.

[jeroenhd]

> But they don’t want to

Seems like good enough a reason for them not to do it.

Their tooling is open-source, surely the few people still using unmaintained versions of macOS can create a `LegacyHomeBrew/brew` repository with patches for old macOS versions? It would also be a good place to stuff all the patches and workarounds that may be necessary to support old macOS versions.

[spike021]

Is this something you could add as a hot fix yourself and submit a PR for?

[trinix912]

They said they don’t want that [1]. It’s not just me, several people have asked for it. Maintaining an extra fork just for that is also out of the question for most people.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/14217

[saagarjha]

Most volunteer projects do this.

[jajuuka]

Was gonna say the same thing. There are tons of projects that support older unsupported OS versions or even different platforms. Whether that's macOS, Windows, or older versions of the Linux kernel.