Whenever a discussion about workstation software comes up, homebrew comes up.

This issue, just closed without a solution is evidence of the terrible dependency management system homebrew is built on.

This is actually very opaque problem to somebody who doesn't use Homebrew. Why did `brew' want to install mysql package? Maybe it's percona-toolkit's maintainer who fscked up the job and put a non-alternative dependency on "mysql"?

It's an acknowledged problem with binary distributed packages: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/pull/41595#issue...

Homebrew is more like home made bread that's taken out half way, because it's half-baked and basically terrible.

First they rely on end user compilation for everything, then they support distributing binaries in a way that's as smart as a brick.

Well, being too smart about binary packages after supporting source packages also could give similar results. Gentoo's emerge used heuristics and heavy magic when used with tbz2s, and that failed every now and then.

From package managers I like most how aptitude allows to browse resolutions and allows to choose one and modify it, but this is very far from being trivial to implement.

The source packages simply state that they depend on another package, or one of multiple packages.

The problem is that their half baked binary distribution model doesn't then follow the same dependency rules.

Terrible tool, terrible results.