brew doctor output

N/A (deprecated casks and one deprecated icu4c, dependency of another formula)

Verification

• I ran brew update twice and am still able to reproduce my issue.
• My "brew doctor output" above says Your system is ready to brew or a definitely unrelated Tier message.
• 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.

brew config output

HOMEBREW_VERSION: 5.0.14-59-g45db1ce
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew
HEAD: 45db1ce2ebbf2fcb08ab91652e884e8df8e0f248
Last commit: 28 hours ago
Branch: main
Core tap JSON: 17 Feb 01:55 UTC
Core cask tap JSON: 17 Feb 01:55 UTC
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /opt/homebrew
HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS: []
HOMEBREW_DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENCY: 20
HOMEBREW_FORBID_PACKAGES_FROM_PATHS: set
HOMEBREW_MAKE_JOBS: 10
HOMEBREW_SORBET_RUNTIME: set
Homebrew Ruby: 3.4.8 => /opt/homebrew/Library/Homebrew/vendor/portable-ruby/3.4.8/bin/ruby
CPU: deca-core 64-bit arm_firestorm_icestorm
Clang: 17.0.0 build 1700
Git: 2.53.0 => /opt/homebrew/bin/git
Curl: 8.7.1 => /usr/bin/curl
macOS: 15.7.3-arm64
CLT: 26.2.0.0.1.1764812424
Xcode: N/A
Rosetta 2: false

What were you trying to do (and why)?

I tried to brew edit a formula to test a change before submitting it. Homebrew wasn't in developer mode.

What happened (include all command output)?

I tried a first brew edit, it opened the formula in an editor, but also toggled the developer mode on.

brew edit qsv
Warning: edit is a developer command, so Homebrew's
developer mode has been automatically turned on.
To turn developer mode off, run:
  brew developer off

Editing /opt/homebrew/opt/qsv/.brew/qsv.rb
Warning: Using codium because no editor was set in the environment.
This may change in the future, so we recommend setting `$EDITOR`
or `$HOMEBREW_EDITOR` to your preferred text editor.

It seems it created a copy of the formula alone somewhere. Any modification done to this file would anyway not work as Homebrew would still try to install from the API.

Subsequent brew edit command would fail, probably because as developer mode was toggled on, it now would like to find Formulas in Taps, and Core wasn't clones as a Tap when developer mode was toggled on.

brew edit qsv
Warning: edit is a developer command, so Homebrew's
developer mode has been automatically turned on.
To turn developer mode off, run:
  brew developer off

Usage: brew edit [options] [formula|cask|tap ...]

Open a formula, cask or tap in the editor set by $EDITOR or
$HOMEBREW_EDITOR, or open the Homebrew repository for editing if no argument
is provided.

      --formula, --formulae        Treat all named arguments as formulae.
      --cask, --casks              Treat all named arguments as casks.
      --print-path                 Print the file path to be edited, without
                                   opening an editor.
  -d, --debug                      Display any debugging information.
  -q, --quiet                      Make some output more quiet.
  -v, --verbose                    Make some output more verbose.
  -h, --help                       Show this message.

Error: Invalid usage: qsv doesn't exist on disk.
Run brew create --set-name qsv $URL to create a new formula!

After that, I could sometimes "fix" things by toggling developer mode off again, but sometimes doing it fixes nothing.

User can also force tap with brew tap --force homebrew/core

What did you expect to happen?

Several possibilities:

• Either the edit should work directly, without needing developer mode
• Or if developer mode is required, when triggered like that, it should tap core/casks
• Either way, subsequent edits shouldn't end up broken

With or without the above, written instructions could also be a solution to manage the case of edits with developer mode off: block edits and state to the user they need to be in developer mode and tap core/casks or something along that line.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions (by running brew commands)

- Have a Homebrew install not in developer mode (preferably that never was in developer mode, fresh install without taps)
- Try to edit a formula
- It could open a copy of the formula, in `/opt/homebrew/opt/qsv/.brew/`, but will also toggle developer mode on
- Subsequent tries of edit will fail (see the above)
- From there, user can try to play around manual tap, toggle developer mode off and so on.