installing brew

Curtis Perry wrote:

what is added for the path and what is the correct file to add it to

Here are some download and installation docs (and which also covers the different shell login scripts):

… https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-use-homebrew-on-macos

Generally… Homebrew usually tells you what it is going to do and then prompts to proceed, when it installs.

… https://brew.sh/

… https://docs.brew.sh/Installation

As Homebrew sometimes gets tangled, the following can usually remove it:

https://github.com/homebrew/install#uninstall-homebrew

I would leave any Python installation to the official installer downloaded from Python.org, not to Homebrew.

Depending on particular package dependencies, homebrew may attempt to install a certain version of Python and that will be fortunately thwarted by the preexisting installation from the Python.org installer.

VikingOSX wrote:

Depending on particular package dependencies, homebrew may attempt to install a certain version of Python and that will be fortunately thwarted by the preexisting installation from the Python.org installer.

Yeah. In my experience, the Homebrew-installed version of Python is probably best considered to be a dependency for other Homebrew packages, and not as a generally-available tool.

Homebrew works well most of the time (and I do use it), but can sometimes also get badly tangled.

I find that the package creep continues as package maintainers add additional dependency requirements over time. Occasionally, I will just wipe the homebrew installation and start over with fewer packages after considering need.

brew info some-package
brew_deps some-package

where brew_deps is an alias that does not perform a package installation, just a graphical tree view of dependencies:

alias brew_deps='brew deps --tree --installed "$@"'

Try that on Imagemagick or graphviz to see a tree from h_ll. 😉