[Formula author] Benefit of instructing users to run tap first?

[jpmcb]

I've noticed that almost all projects instruct users to do the following:

$ brew tap github-org/repo-name
$ brew install my-formula

but I've also noticed that you can do:

$ brew install github-org/repo-name/my-formula

which appears to do a tap first and then installs the repo.

What's the benefit of instructing users to run a tap first? I couldn't find much documentation around this or relevant issues / discussions here. Happy to be pointed to some docs! Thanks all

[carlocab]

If your tap is on GitHub, then there aren't really any benefits to doing brew tap before brew install, other than not having to pass the fully-qualified github-org/tap-name/formula-name to brew install. (That benefit is, admittedly, dubious.)

If your tap is not hosted on GitHub (e.g. GitLab), then you need to do brew tap first, because doing brew install will have brew looking up either a wrong or non-existent tap.

[jpmcb]

Thanks much! That's helpful context!!