Mac homebrew and homebrew-alt

2011-03-23

Update 2012-08-23

Thanks to a comment from Ryan (see comments below) I'm now aware that homebrew itself has a homebrew-dupes repo.

From the README:

Just brew tap homebrew/dupes and then brew install <formula>.

If the formula conflicts with one from mxcl/master or another tap, you can brew install homebrew/dupes/<formula>.

You can also install via URL:

brew install https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes/master/&lt;formula&gt;.rb

Original post

Updating mac homebrew from 0.7.1 to 0.8 removed the rsync formula that I use to update mac rsync from the supplied 2.x version to 3.x.

This is due to the fact that homebrew doesn't want duplicates of existing software.

However - these are still available via homebrew-alt

For example - to regain the rsync formula was as simple as:

brew install https://github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt/raw/master/duplicates/rsync.rb