Level 4

3,522 points

Homebrew Has Stopped Working on El Capitan

So, not really a question for the community - more an advisory.

Sadly, Homebrew appears to no longer work on El Capitan and it may not be fixed.

What happens: Any brew command that actually invokes work on the file systems will quickly SEGFAULT (any brew install, upgrade, etc)

Why: Well, to quote one of the maintainers, "Ruby 3.3 changed name generation for temporary files to use a

cryptographic RNG (CCRandomGenerateBytes). CCRNG in 10.11 uses GCD under the hood which is incompatible in forks pre-exec. CCRNG was overhauled in 10.12 to avoid this issue."

While it may be possible for the maintainers to modify the code base so some things happen before forking...there's a parallel discussion about just bumping the minimum allowed version to 10.12. Not sure how it is going to go (but the issue I opened has been sitting with no obvious changes since end-Jun - hopefully the maintianers are just on vacation, but I fear not).

Anyway, if you are on El Capitan and use homebrew...well you can't install or update anything anymore.

Posted on Aug 13, 2024 1:34 PM

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Matti Haveri

Level 7

21,380 points

Posted on Aug 13, 2024 11:53 PM

FWIW I have used MacPorts since Mojave and it seems to support old OS X down to Leopard. Backup and uninstall Homebrew before trying (and maybe reset paths to their defaults -- it is not recommended to use Homebrew and MacPorts in same system).

https://www.macports.org/install.php#installing

You need Xcode 7.3 for El Capitan.

https://xcodereleases.com/

https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

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5 replies

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Matti Haveri

Level 7

21,380 points

Aug 13, 2024 11:53 PM in response to g_wolfman

https://www.macports.org/install.php#installing

You need Xcode 7.3 for El Capitan.

https://xcodereleases.com/

https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

g_wolfman Author

Level 4

3,522 points

Aug 13, 2024 3:39 PM in response to VikingOSX

Current versions of Homebrew only support macOS 12 or later.

Older versions will work - you just get the "this is an older version of macOS and we don't support it so don't complain if things don't work" warning, the odds of getting pre-compiled bottles drops significantly, and the risk of dependencies breaking in the compile stream increases significantly.

But it seems that older is now lower-bounded by macOS 10.12. RIP 10.11 Homebrew builds!

g_wolfman Author

Level 4

3,522 points

Aug 28, 2024 5:34 PM in response to g_wolfman

Well - pleasant surprise!

The folks over on the Homebrew project did a real solid...which is to say they actually threw some effort against the issue I raised. I really thought El Capitan would be too old and the Homebrew user base on El Capitan too small to justify putting effort against it.

The issue will be resolved in the 4.3.19 release and they are confident it will persist at least until 4.4 (but no promises at that point). I'll take it!

VikingOSX

Level 10

128,624 points

Aug 13, 2024 3:31 PM in response to g_wolfman

Current versions of Homebrew require macOS Monterey 12.* or later.

VikingOSX

Level 10

128,624 points

Aug 14, 2024 6:01 AM in response to g_wolfman

I have been using homebrew for a very long time. I even have it in El Capitan as a Parallel's guest but these days rarely use anything older than Monterey based on my active Mac hardware.

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Homebrew Has Stopped Working on El Capitan