Bundled Homebrew version is too old

[bbannier]

Cirrus macos machines include Homebrew which is great. However the bundled Homebrew version is old and uses Homebrew bintray bottle locations which are not live anymore (see Homebrew/discussions#691). The Homebrew change to move bottle downloads from bintray to Github packages is Homebrew/brew#11070 which first appeared in homebrew-3.1.0. Cirrus macos machines seem to come with homebrew-2.7.1.

Expected Behavior

The following script should install the Homebrew LLVM package from a precompiled bottle (expected Homebrew default behavior) when run from a Cirrus macos job.

brew install llvm

Real Behavior

Executing the script either leads to a hard failure since the remote returns 403 Forbidden, or some other failure status which causes the package to be compiled from source (which takes long and could lead to e.g., Cirrus timeouts down the line).

A possible workaround seems to be to first run

brew update

This seems to update Homebrew sufficiently so it can use the new, correct bottle locations. This step however takes considerable time (~5min).

Related Info

This is a (tick one of the following):

• Website issue
  • Link to page:
• Task issue
  • OS: macOS
  • Task name:
  • Script/cache name (if applies):

[fkorotkov]

Which macOS VM are you using? big-sur-xcode-12.5 has a new enough version of brew.

[bbannier]

Which macOS VM are you using? big-sur-xcode-12.5 has a new enough version of brew.

I validated that I see this with catalina-base. I also seem to see this with big-sur-base, but haven't explicitly validated it.

[rsmmr]

What would be the recommendation here? All our tests based on catalina-base and big-sur-base are currently breaking. Should we switch to the *-xcode-12.5 versions?

[bbannier]

Is there any plan to fix these macos images so that the bundled Homebrew is actually usable?

[fkorotkov]

big-sur-base image got update to the latest macOS 11.6 and all the up-to-date packages. Please give it a try. We'll build a new xcode image with Xcode 13 RC in the next couple of days.

[bbannier]

Like I commented in cirruslabs/macos-image-templates#37 (comment), we really need working Homebrew on all supported macos images.

[fkorotkov]

We are planning to deprecate Big Sur and Catalina VMs in early 2023. Monterey and Ventura VMs have up-to-date versions of Homebrew and getting constantly updated.