Homebrew: Whom to ask for a formula to be added?

Question

After many years of using fink and macports, I threw it all away to install homebrew, which indeed is more robust and easy to use. But, to my utter disappointment, I discovered that some programs (which I consider as great classics, but that can be very subjective) are not provided as homebrew formulae. An example of missing formula: gv (a very efficient PostScript viewer which allows easy calculation of bounding boxes for LaTeX users).

So my question is: whom can I ask to kindly adapt this piece of software to the homebrew system? Is there some forum where I can submit my wishes, hoping that some kind soul will fulfill them?

Answer 1

Nobody. Homebrew is run by volunteers on their own spare time.

However it’s an open-source project you can contribute to. In fact it’s the GitHub project with the most contributors ever.

Start by checking if your formula exists:

$ brew search <formula>

Then ensure it meets the requirements:

• It should be mature and have stable releases. Homebrew won’t accept the project you started yesterday and for which you just released the 0.0.1-alpha-wip version.
• It should be used; they don’t accept niche stuff
• It should still be maintained. Unless it’s very popular an obscure Perl program released in 1994 and untouched since won’t be accepted.
• It should be built from source. Homebrew doesn’t accept pre-built binaries and closed-source software.

You now have to find a tarball for the software. Let’s say you want to add a formula for foo version 1.2. The homepage says the tarball is at https://example.com/foo-1.2.tar.gz.

Run brew create https://example.com/foo-1.2.tar.gz to get a pre-populated template for your formula. Modify it using the cookbook until it’s ready; can be installed without error using brew install foo and passes brew audit --strict --online foo.

You’re now ready and can checkout a branch, commit your new file with the message “foo 1.2 (new formula)” and make a pull-request.

Once you made the pull-request our CI bot will take it and test it on three different VMs running the last three versions of OS X. Once it’s green and the maintainers are happy it’ll be included in Homebrew.

If you’re lucky and found an easy-to-install software you can do all of the above and get the formula included under one hour.