Homebrew 2.2 releases with support for macOS Catalina

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Yesterday, the project manager of Homebrew, Mike McQuaid, announced the release of Homebrew 2.2. This is the third release of Homebrew this year. Some of the major highlights of this new version include support to macOS Catalina, faster implementations of HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS and brew upgrade’s post-install dependent checking, and more.

New key features in Homebrew 2.2

Homebrew will now support macOS Catalina (10.15), support to macOS Sierra (10.12) and older are unsupported
The speed of the no-op case for HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS has become extremely fast and defaults to 5 minutes instead of 1
The brew upgrade will no longer give an unsuccessful error code if the formula is up-to-date.
Homebrew upgrade’s post-install dependent checking is now exceedingly faster and reliable.
Homebrew on Linux has updated and raised its minimum requirements.
Starting from Homebrew 2.2, the software package management system will use OpenSSL 1.1.
The Homebrew team has disabled the brew tap-pin since it was buggy and not much used by Homebrew maintainers.
It will stop supporting Python 2.7 by the end of 2019 as it will reach EOL.

Many users are excited about this release and have appreciated the maintainers of Homebrew for their efforts.

A user on Hacker News comments, “While Homebrew is perhaps technically crude and somewhat inflexible compared to other and older package managers, I think it deserves real credit for being so easy to add packages to. I contributed Homebrew packages after a few weeks of using macOS, while I didn’t contribute a single package in the ten years I ran Debian.

I’m also impressed by the focus of the maintainers and their willingness for saying no and cutting features. We need more of that in the programming field. Homebrew is unashamedly solely for running the standard configuration of the newest version of well-behaved programs, which covers at least 90% of my use cases. I use Nix when I want something complicated or nonstandard.”

To know about the features in detail, head over to Hombrew’s official page.