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Homebrew's policy is to not apply patches that upstream doesn't accept, though I do notice that they are sometimes applying patches to the build systems themselves to patch in some of the paths to include files living deep inside the macOS SDK.

Given that policy I would assume that such a package might die until somebody forks it and takes on responsibility for maintenance.

Homebrew is about building and installing upstream packages, not about installing and maintaining custom forks of packages.




It's worth noting, btw, that this is another major difference between Homebrew and MacPorts. MacPorts maintains tons of their own patches, whether to make software work at all or just to add support for older or newer OS's.


... which is a blessing and a curse: When they are doing a good job, that's perfect because it means that some software which wouldn't run correctly now runs correctly.

When they are doing a bad job, they might anger maintainers ("I didn't add this bug - this was added by macports - complain to them!"), or they might introduce additional security issues not present in the upstream package (see the Debian openssl bug from 2008)

It might also mean that you're not getting the latest versions of upstream packages because adding those patches and rebasing them on top of upstream changes takes time.

Being close to upstream was a selling-point of homebrew back in the days when it was just a collection of scripts to make it easier to build original source distributions of common Unix software.




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