Homebrew phpNN-xdebug missing?

Question

I'm trying to install php56-xdebug on a mac using homebrew. All the advice on how to do this seems to be out of date by two weeks.

I started with the obvious:

$ brew install php56-xdebug
Error: No available formula with the name "php56-xdebug"
==> Searching for a previously deleted formula (in the last month)...
Error: No previously deleted formula found.
==> Searching for similarly named formulae...
==> Searching local taps...
Error: No similarly named formulae found.
==> Searching taps...
==> Searching taps on GitHub...
Error: No formulae found in taps.

When I use brew search xdebug I get

==> Searching local taps...
==> Searching taps on GitHub...
==> Searching blacklisted, migrated and deleted formulae...
No formula found for "xdebug".

followed by a whole bunch of closed pull requests. brew update and brew doctor did not help.

There are several other questions like mine here, and most answers say that I need to add tap homebrew/php, but that seems no longer to be the case:

$ brew tap homebrew/php
Error: homebrew/php was deprecated. This tap is now empty as all its formulae were migrated

But migrated to where? The git repo for homebrew/php was closed 16 days ago, with the memo "migrate to homebrew/core". But I can find nothing about the missing formulae there. "php56" appears only in the formula for updating php itself. In the search they don't even show up under "recently deleted".

Am I just unlucky to need xdebug while php56 support is in some sort of homebrew-limbo as the formulae are moved to the core repo?

If the answer to that is yes, then a follow-up is, "does this kind of thing happen often?"

Answer 1

As noted on homebrew/homebrew-php:

All formulae were migrated to Homebrew/homebrew-core or deleted.

So, if the formula aren't in core, they're gone. Let's see what's in core:

$ git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core.git
...
$ ls -1 homebrew-core/Formula/php*
homebrew-core/Formula/php-code-sniffer.rb
homebrew-core/Formula/php-cs-fixer.rb
homebrew-core/Formula/php.rb
homebrew-core/Formula/[email protected]
homebrew-core/Formula/[email protected]
homebrew-core/Formula/[email protected]
homebrew-core/Formula/phplint.rb
homebrew-core/Formula/phpunit.rb

So I see PHP 5.6 proper, as well as a few PHP devops utilities. I do not see XDebug, however.

Given the statement on the news page:

Unfortunately we have been unable to maintain an acceptable, consistent user or contributor experience and CI workload through non-core formula taps in the Homebrew organisation so we are continuing to migrate widely used formulae into Homebrew/core and encourage more niche formulae and options to be supported outside the Homebrew organisation.

about "continuing" to migrate, and given that the migration was from Python 2.7 to 3+ - which is not necessarily trivial - I'd suspect they are currently in limbo... or gone.