Homebrew, de facto standard package manager for macOS, now forces Apple's $99/yr notarization bullshit for all casks.
5.0.0
Shame on you, Homebrew, for effectively killing FOSS apps from casks.
Et tu brewtus?
Their explanation as to why:
--no-quarantineis used to forcibly bypass Gatekeeper, which is a built-in macOS security mechanism. This is used to run unsigned/unnotarized applications.macOS Tahoe is the final release to support Intel systems, and last year Apple updated macOS runtime protection to make it harder to override Gatekeeper. Macs with Apple silicon also don't "permit native arm64 code to execute unless a valid signature is attached". Finally, we are ending support for all casks that fail Gatekeeper checks on September 1st, 2026.
With the above in mind, it's time to deprecate the
--no-quarantineflag frombrew. It intentionally bypasses macOS security mechanisms, which we already actively discourage. Deprecating now will give a decent lead time for users using it to come up with another solution or adjust their workflows.
Deprecating now will give a decent lead time for users using it to come up with another solution or adjust their workflows.
The adjusted solution/workflow: use something other than homebrew
Heh, there goes Librewolf's only sane updating mechanism. IIRC, the devs of that are vehemently against paying Apple the money to sign the code, and they also fail to provide their own updater. It was one of the main drivers behind my switch to Waterfox.
bad librewolf, shame on them for not paying the tax
Snark all you want, a browser that breaks every time it updates because the code isn't signed, not great.
May be a sign to install Linux 😏 brew sucks anyways
True but I desperately need no compatibility, closed source, AppleCare, expensive hardware, limited lifespan, lock in .... What did you call it Linux?
It's crazy how bad software compatibility on macos is. I used to assume it was about the same or slightly better than linux in that regard, but my attempts to help my friend play games on macos have almost entirely failed despite the fact that I have tons of experience playing games on linux since it's always been my main os
The unsigned (FOSS) Apps aren't removed yet. They will be removed by 2026-09-01. Removing --no-quarantine before that seems counter productive. And quite frankly removing unsigned Apps at all seems like a stupid idea. Homebrew is a third party package mamager, why are they precapitulating to Apple?
Third party taps (or are they fourth party?) will step in. You can run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine in the .rb file.
Relevant links.
I don't think this is homebrews fault? It looks like apps need to be signed to run on apple silicone.
Yes and no. Yes, it has to be signed, but no, it doesn't have to be Apple's signing, it can be ad-hoc signed for the device programmatically. What they're doing is that removing that ability to remove quarantine bits and ad-hoc signing on installation and forcing everything to be Apple-signed.
EDIT: Ad-hoc signing is compile-time. Quarantine bit just has to be removed at install-time.
100% their fault since there's a way to ad-hoc sign and run, and they're removing it and sucking Apple's dick.
EDIT: and there's even an example found in one of this post's comment of a 3rd party cask doing that in preparation of complete flag removal from Homebrew!
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/20755#issuecomment-3330984446
In the end, the whole point of Gatekeeper is to protect end users as much as reasonable, and continuing to make it easy to bypass isn't a good thing in my view.
Whole point of Gatekeeper is Apple policing users’ devices. The security benefit is just a side effect. If anything, users need to be protected from Apple more than small time hackers.
This is a shame. Big tech brain is affecting developers everywhere.
Controversial opinion: best way to learn fire will burn you is to try and see. I personally learned a lot about computers by infecting my machine with a shitton of malware when I was a kid. Modern parents are very adamant on letting kids run free and learn stuff by themselves, why not apply the same logic to computers?
What a shame. It’s probably my favorite tool on the platform.
I never understood what a "cask" in the brew lanuage means. I just do installs and if the brew install instructions involves a cask I just do it. How do I figure out which packages this will have an effect on on my system?
Casks are as a rule GUI applications. So if you want to install Firefox with homebrew would need to install it via a cask.
Well, I’m pretty happy that I’ve moved most of my app downloads to a nix config I guess.
Seems like a bigger change than deserves to be buried in the changelog. I wonder what the intent here is.
What does this mean?
Apps have to be signed to be installed.
You can still install and run them but you need to manually him through the startup hoops once
if you use a Mac git gud.
Homebrew could provide their own casks of FOSS applications, compiled on their infrastructure and signed by their key. It's kinda what F-Droid does on phones.
Code signing should be done though.
You can disagree with Apple's approach that maintains them as the only signing authority, but, at a fundamental level, code signing is the only way to distribute an executable and have the user be able to trust who authored it (and thus what's in it).
Fuck homebrew mise cru for life now.
Of the like 30 things I have installed through brew, 1 is not signed. Do I agree with the change, no. But there are other options out there.
dafuq? That's basically the entire point
So yeah, there will be a fork soon that's just compatible with the casks. Luckily that is very easily to do / manage