Brew link error has multiple installed versions

Is the solution proposed by carlocab the only way to work around it? I don't consider this a solution. It's not taking Homebrew forward - it's going backward. I think either the switch command should be re-introduced possibly warning about its problems , or an alternative should be implemented.

I'm still interested to learn about the motivation of having switch disabled. I found out from the changelog that it was deprecated in 2. Using brew switch allowed users to switch to unmaintained and possibly broken builds of software Homebrew software and tricking homebrew into thinking that was the latest version.

SMillerDev could you explain this bit please? I agree. The ability of Homebrew to keep the previously installed version and downgrade to it quickly is an extremely useful feature that I've used quite often in the past.

It was people doing an upgrade, switching back to openssl 1. Every package update tests all its dependencies in CI so it rarely happens that a brew upgrade breaks a part of brew. If you need specific versions of software for development, using a container, virtual machine or something like rbenv is probably a better solution than mixing homebrew versions, since that was never an intended use case.

Today I upgraded a package, which apparently pulled in ruby as a dependency of one of its dependencies. I tried deleting 3. This is intended behavior.

Homebrew will always provide you with the latest versions of software. If you need a specific ruby version, rbenv is my recommendation. It shouldn't be the way of things. Though point about rbenv or something like anaconda in case of Python is valid however there are a lot of software that don't have each own packet manager and still the newest version brakes some support for a lot of features.

I use Homebrew on 3 Linux systems and my MacBook and these are a few more suggestions I can make to help avoid some of these issues in the future:. Don't install anything into the cellar of a package or modify the files in there. Everything in the cellar gets deleted when a package is upgraded. The only package I've used that required intervention to stop something from being installed into the cellar is perl , and when you install it, it warns you about this and gives you specific instructions about how to fix it.

If you see a package in the list whose upgrade you think will cause issues, you can use brew pin to temporarily hold it back from being upgraded while you figure out how to deal with the upgrade.

Do note that doing so means you can't upgrade any package that depends on the pinned package, so you should just use this as a stopgap measure until you've figured how to manage the upgrade. And to reiterate what has already been said here already, the goal of Homebrew is to provide you with the latest software, not to maintain strictly versioned environments.

Many other tools exist to allow you to install versioned software - containers, Anaconda, Spack, python virtualenvs, rbenv, etc. All of these can be used side-by-side with Homebrew in some cases it takes a bit of work to make them get along. Skip to content.

This repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only. Star Error: Failed executing: autoreconf --force --install sshfs. Labels python. Copy link. Relevant excerpt Installing sshfs dependency: glib Making install in gdbus Please check config. Really not even brew install wget or something works? I correct myself. Here's how to configure your Mac so that you can easily install any version of Python. If you're a Ruby developer, you'll likely understand the power behind Ruby Version Manager or rbenv.

This is pretty much the same thing for Python. The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:. Sorry, something went wrong. I did run brew cleanup but node 0. I see now that the brew cleanup should do what I want.

I found upgrading to a newer version of a formula wasn't working for me, so I used brew switch to change back to the previous version. So now I'd like to just get rid of the newer version, using brew , since I won't be using the new formula at this time. I agree that it would be nice for brew uninstall to take an optional version to make this more seamless.