Homebrew tap for neovim nightly binaries 🍺

[benjiwolff]

In #28125 I was confused to find that brew install neovim --HEAD (see Homebrew formula) does not install all dependencies necessary to run the development/nightly version of neovim, so I made a homebrew cask tap that downloads the nightly build. This should make it a bit more convenient to install and update neovim nightly. Feel free to fork this onto neovim.

benjiwolff/homebrew-neovim-nightly

[clason]

No thank you; we're not interested in maintaining distro-specific builds, and we're adamant that if you use nightly, you should get it straight from our repo -- after all, you're testing Neovim, not distro builds or installations.

[benjiwolff]

I understand. However, I find these 20 lines of code comparable to the release notes in terms of maintenance since they are already specific to macOS. For that little effort, it seems a bit weird to me, not to support Homebrew. Especially, if the goal is that people stay up to date with the latest nightly releases.

[clason]

It's the principle.

1. We don't support any distros, period (else where to draw the line?)
2. We don't support using nightlies for production use (they can break too often); you're welcome to, of course, but if you're using one, you're implicitly agreeing to help with Neovim development. And adding indirection makes this harder (for testing and bisecting purposes).

[benjiwolff]

1. You do explicitly support macOS. It's not like there are 20 macOS distributions and package managers. Linux is another story and I am not saying that the same effort/reward tradeoff applies there.
2. Using a package manager does not imply that I am using the nightly release in production or that I do not agree with helping in the development of Neovim. After all, I still have to opt into the nightly version. For this reason I do not suggest it is added to the default homebrew-cask tap but rather to a standalone neovim repository.

[clason]

1. We do support macOS as a platform, but the only distribution we support (on macOS and elsewhere) is a) our own releases, from our own Releases page and b) build from source, with our build scripts.

2. Helping with development implies testing with a known installation that we control.

[dundargoc]

Can you not just send a PR to homebrew instead to fix that?

[clason]

No, because that (no parsers) is intentional. Homebrew does not support --HEAD builds either.