Remove brew tap --force-auto-update option

[Lekensteyn]

Verification

• This issue's title and/or description do not reference a single formula e.g. brew install wget. If they do, open an issue at https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/new/choose instead.

Provide a detailed description of the proposed feature

The brew tap --force-auto-update function has been removed since March 2024 (Brew 4.2.13, 9ac3182). The documentation in docs/Taps.md seems outdated.

Proposal:

• Remove the sentence from docs/Taps.md
• Remove the --force-auto-update option from brew tap
• Remove the force_auto_update option from bundles (Brewfile). This was already removed from the README in 5f29ab8. There only seems to be a single user on GitHub: https://github.com/search?q=%22force_auto_update%3A+true%22+AND+path%3ABrewfile+AND+NOT+%22https%3A%2F%2Fuser%40bitbucket.org%2Fuser%2Fhomebrew-tap-repo.git%22&type=code

Open question: can we just remove these options without any deprecation cycle? I think that it would be rather educational for the command to fail hard rather than silently accepting the option?

Based on brew 4.5.0, but current master looks similar:

$ git grep -niEe 'force.?auto.?update'
Library/Homebrew/bundle/tap_installer.rb:22:        args.append("--force-auto-update") if options[:force_auto_update]
Library/Homebrew/cmd/tap.rb:36:        switch "--[no-]force-auto-update",
Library/Homebrew/sorbet/rbi/dsl/homebrew/cmd/tap_cmd.rbi:27:  def force_auto_update?; end
Library/Homebrew/tap.rb:478:      config.delete(:forceautoupdate)
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/dsl_spec.rb:18:        tap 'auto/update', 'https://bitbucket.org/auto/update.git', force_auto_update: true
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/dsl_spec.rb:45:        force_auto_update: true,
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:59:    context "with force_auto_update" do
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:62:                                                          "--force-auto-update",
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:65:        expect(described_class.preinstall("homebrew/cask", force_auto_update: true)).to be(true)
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:66:        expect(described_class.install("homebrew/cask", force_auto_update: true)).to be(true)
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:71:                                                          "--force-auto-update",
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:74:        expect(described_class.preinstall("homebrew/cask", force_auto_update: true)).to be(true)
Library/Homebrew/test/bundle/tap_installer_spec.rb:75:        expect(described_class.install("homebrew/cask", force_auto_update: true)).to be(false)
Library/Homebrew/test/cmd/tap_spec.rb:12:    expect { brew "tap", "--force-auto-update", "homebrew/bar", path/".git" }

What is the motivation for the feature?

We had some outdated documentation on using a tap that mentioned this option. To reduce any confusion on the purpose of this option, let's remove it or improve the documentation.

How will the feature be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users?

Removing the option simplifies the documentation and reduces a source of confusion. It will likely not be relevant to the majority of Homebrew users.

What alternatives to the feature have been considered?

Add a warning when this option is in use.

[alex391]

I'm a new contributor to Brew, and I think I can take on this issue. I'm going to make a PR for the documentation change. I'm a little confused about the other two: are the “Remove the --force-auto-update option from brew tap” and the “Remove the force_auto_update option from bundles (Brewfile).” items already complete?

[Lekensteyn]

Hi @alex391 , the other tasks are not complete yet. I opened this issue to solicit whether it was okay to go ahead and remove the code without a deprecation cycle.

[alex391]

Ah, OK, thanks for the follow-up, I was unsure, because the way you worded it made it seem like brew tap --force-auto-update was already removed, but yeah running it still does something (or at least doesn't cause an error) in Homebrew 4.5.0-101-g2af5eab

My two cents on whether it's ok to just delete it is this: from the perspective of a new user like me, it's really confusing to have a feature that does nothing. It would be also jarring if it just threw a warning, because it's weird to have a function that is useless except to generate that warning. So I'd say it's ok to delete without any deprecation cycle.