feat: Add brew doctor --ignore-warnings

[9999years]

When brew doctor is run, brew exits with a non-zero status if any warnings or errors are encountered. However, this groups warnings and errors together, but (as the output notes) warnings can be innocuous:

Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew
maintainers with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use
Homebrew for is working fine: please don't worry or file an issue;
just ignore this. Thanks!

The --ignore-warnings switch makes it possible for automated tools interacting with Homebrew to distinguish between warnings and hard errors.

$ brew doctor --ignore-warnings
Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew maintainers
with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use Homebrew for is
working fine: please don't worry or file an issue; just ignore this. Thanks!

Warning: Some installed casks are deprecated or disabled.
You should find replacements for the following casks:
  graphql-playground
$ echo "$?"
0

Hard errors will still cause a non-zero exit status:

$ brew doctor --ignore-warnings
Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew maintainers
with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use Homebrew for is
working fine: please don't worry or file an issue; just ignore this. Thanks!

Warning: gettext files detected at a system prefix.
These files can cause compilation and link failures, especially if they
are compiled with improper architectures. Consider removing these files:
  /opt/homebrew/lib/libgettextlib.dylib
  /opt/homebrew/lib/libintl.dylib
  /opt/homebrew/include/libintl.h
Error: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno
$ echo "$?"
1

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• Have you added an explanation of what your changes do and why you'd like us to include them?
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• Have you successfully run brew tests with your changes locally?

---

[MikeMcQuaid]

The --ignore-warnings switch makes it possible for automated tools interacting with Homebrew to distinguish between warnings and hard errors.

There is no distinction in brew doctor made between warnings and errors.

Automated tools should either avoid running brew doctor at all or ensure that all warnings are fixed if it's essential that it passes.

Error: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno

This is not a brew doctor warning, it's a random Homebrew warning that will trigger from many other commands.

[9999years]

This is not a brew doctor warning, it's a random Homebrew warning that will trigger from many other commands.

I understand that (although perhaps it should be a brew doctor error). What command would you recommend I run to check for this error, if not brew doctor?

[MikeMcQuaid]

What command would you recommend I run to check for this error, if not brew doctor?

How are you triggering this error? It seems like you're on an unknown macOS version?

[9999years]

I maintain a developer environment bootstrapping tool which (among other things) installs Homebrew and then PostgreSQL with Homebrew. I'm working on a feature to upgrade the PostgreSQL installation. However, we only use Homebrew for PostgreSQL, so developers rarely update it on their own. As a result, we have a bunch of engineers running macOS Sonoma with versions of Homebrew too old to support macOS Sonoma.

I can solve this with brew update, but the tool tries to avoid doing unnecessary work, so I'd like to avoid it if possible. Therefore, I'd like to detect if the current version of macOS is supported by the current version of Homebrew.

Ideally, I'd also like to catch any other show-stopper errors with the Homebrew installation, and I was hoping I could use brew doctor for this purpose.

[9999years]

BTW I appreciate you taking the time to talk this over! I would've included more context in the original PR description but I thought the feature was uncontroversial enough that it wasn't warranted.

[Bo98]

That error isn't an intentional from brew doctor - it's just you hitting a code path that is immediately aborting on an invalid macOS. If it was an intentional error it would have a proper message and wouldn't abort immediately. This is technically a bug so could be fixed if someone finds where it breaks.

You could try brew doctor check_for_unsupported_macos. It does however also check for old macOS that are semi-unsupported (i.e. Big Sur and earlier).

[MikeMcQuaid]

Sorry, passing on this PR but hopefully @Bo98's suggested workaround is useful.

[9999years]

@Bo98 Thanks, brew doctor check_for_unsupported_macos works great for this!