Does homebrew still want you to chown system folders?
(I don’t know why Intel Macs still use /usr/local.) In any case, it’s possible to choose a custom installation location, even on Intel Macs if you prefer.
https://docs.brew.sh/Installation
Further discussion on the decision:
"But we notified you!"
Consent does not work that way.
It keeps being pointed out that this is a nonprofit run by volunteers - this simply underscores your utter lack of a legitimate business use case for spying on your users.
The only reason people insist on opt-out (ie nonconsensual) telemetry is because they know they don't actually have consent and their ingest data would drop like a rock if they had to, you know, check with their users for consent before uploading their usage. It's the old "she never said stop!" dodge.
Consent matters.
A new low for you by literally comparing an open source project gathering analytics to sexual assault and rape this time.
It doesn't matter how you store the data obtained without consent.
What you are doing is fundamentally unethical, and you only get away with it because most of your users are unaware that you are doing it.
I post about it because your users deserve to know what you are silently using their computer to do each time they install a package. You have fooled them (and yourself) with this distraction about a "notice".
So you can, but apparently you shouldn't.
There are tools to rewrite links in binaries, but they only work until you get a program calling dlopen or equivalent
> its possible to choose a custom installation location, even on Intel Macs if you prefer.
Whilst it is physically possible, it won't work.
What would be better is a plan. Putting it in a different system folder like `opt` isn't much better.
The other explanations imply that it may not work due to hard coded paths.
Nothing stopping you from having this owned by a system account, it's just not a path we recommend because it's not the best fit for most of our users.