brew upgrade <package> just upgrades everything

[frequentredundancy]

So I wanted to try and upgrade a single package, specifically php. At the time of writing, that's PHP 8.1.4
So the command I entered was brew upgrade php since the brew documentation/help text lead me to believe this would ONLY update the single package.

However, brew seems to just completely ignore this and decides to upgrade everything anyway? Can someone please explain why? This seems like incredibly bad design, since all I wanted to do was upgrade PHP 8.1 a few patch versions which realistically would take 20-30 seconds max, and instead a number of completely unrelated packages also got upgraded leading to my upgrade of "only php 8.1" taking well over 20+ minutes. Because I'm on an M1 Mac, a lot of these packages have to be built from source which takes a considerable amount of time and absolutely destroys battery life because some of them are absolutely huge and take upwards of 10+ minutes to compile.

I understand dependencies of PHP 8.1 needing to be upgraded since, well they are dependencies that it relies on. But brew seriously just decides it's going to upgrade everything, including packages that I'm confident have very little to do with PHP 8.1. For example;

• Nginx
• Python 2 AND 3
• Httpd
• PHP 7.4 and 8.0
• Other utility packages I have like youtube-dl for example.

I'm not sure if I'm using the command wrong, but I seem to be using it exactly as the documentation suggests and it seems to just not work any different from just writing brew upgrade.

If this is the case, then what exactly is the point in specifying the package in the command in the first place?

[SMillerDev]

Because I'm on an M1 Mac, a lot of these packages have to be built from source which takes a considerable amount of time and absolutely destroys battery life because some of them are absolutely huge and take upwards of 10+ minutes to compile.

There is almost nothing that should require this on M1 unless you installed in a non-default location.

The explanation for your initial question is here though:
https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-does-brew-upgrade-formula-or-brew-install-formula-also-upgrade-a-bunch-of-other-stuff

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TL;DR install in the default location and regularly update your software and you won't have this issue.

[heyalexchoi]

truly wild behavior. would expect a warning that xyz upgrades would be triggered, and maybe a tool to help find a version to install that would not require upgrades.

[chorner]

I agree this is wacky. IMO it's the development approach favored by the ruby community: optimize for maintainer ease, ignore the user experience.

[aeamaea]

I have it installed in the "default location", I upgrade it pretty regularly (actually because it just downloads every single forumula every time I make the mistake of installing any new formula ) and tried to install GPG. It's been installing newovim, erlang, and ever other gosh darn thing it can get its hands on. This should NOT be default behaviour, and if it's going to do something like this, it should at least warn the user and give them the option of opting out. Sometimes, we really don't need to burn our battery trying to install what we think might be just one package and a couple dependencies. I fail to see how how neovim and erlang formulas are somehow a dependency for gpg. It's just upgrading/re-installing everthing and that's not a good trip.

[SMillerDev]

actually because it just downloads every single forumula every time I make the mistake of installing any new formula

It doesn't, as is explained in the link I posted.

I fail to see how how neovim and erlang formulas are somehow a dependency for gpg.

Checking the dependency tree of all three of those I suspect the following:

• gpg depends on gettext directly and [email protected] indirectly
• both were outdated on your system
• updating them resulted in updating all software that depends on them, which includes neovim through gettext and erlang through [email protected]

[konnano]

Upgrade with brew install php instead of brew upgrade php

[ivancuric]

This is just bad API design

[melkamar]

I found a related discussion here https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/57 but that was locked, so I will add my 2c here.

I have just run a brew install jpegoptim, which resulted in a 15-minute-long download and installation of a lot of stuff. It ended up failing on some node install step, but I can live with that, I just need to get working with PHP quickly. But, turns out, installing jpegoptim caused my PHP to upgrade 8.1 -> 8.3, so now my PHP dev environment does not work.

Based on the linked discussion, this is just how things work with reverse dependency resolution, and I am not trying to change that philosophy. What I really think, though, is that there should be a default behavior of warning the user and requiring a confirmation (in an interactive session, to avoid the "but what about CI argument").

Brew must know what it will do with what packages, so it should not be very difficult to display the proposed changes to the user and just ask "are you ok with this"?

(for random people who might stumble here -- the command to revert PHP at least is brew unlink php && brew link --overwrite --force [email protected])

[quackerex]

My solution to this is remove anything I am not using currently.
So If I am not using [email protected] remove that for now and install whenever I need that again.
And run brew autoremove to remove remove any deps that are no longer needed.

This avoids the huge deps trees homebrew needs to upgrade.