Homebrew package upgrades have regularly broken my personal setup, blocking me from completing my current task. My personal Homebrew tap saved the day recently, so it deserves a mention here.
I accidentally upgraded all my Homebrew packages with:
brew upgrade
Later I noticed that saving encrypted files in Emacs was not working. Anytime I tried saving changes Emacs would hang.
After googling I found that others were having the same issue after upgrading their GnuPG package.
I was able to fix the problem after following instructions from StackOverflow. However, that didn't last, I ran into the same trouble with my work computer. This time it was different, I had updated my setup to pin the minor version of GnuPG to 2.2, so I was surprised that even though the correct version was installed, Emacs would still hang during encryption.
The difference was that my personal and work computers were using different PATCH versions:
- Work: 2.2.42
- Personal: 2.2.41
Homebrew does not provide versioned formulas for different PATCH versions of a package, so I couldn't use:
brew install gnupg@2.2.41
I once had a similar situation, I needed to pin the version of package with no versioned formula. To do that, I created a personal Homebrew tap and defined a formula for the desired package.
To fix my configuration, I found the formula for gnupg@2.2 and tweaked it, so that it installed version 2.2.41. This worked fine, the main downside was that the install time got longer since the package is built from sources, no biggie.
I decided to spend the time to write this since it's the second time my personal tap has saved the day. So if you're GnuPG is broken in the same way you can use it too!
brew tap pgpbpadilla/pgpb brew install gnupg@2.2.41
Sources are in Github: pgpbpadilla/homebrew-pgpb.
