Feature Update: Enable user defined HOMEBREW_PREFIX in Linux

[jobs-git]

This still defaults to HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew" when HOMEBREW_PREFIX is not set

[MikeMcQuaid]

Sorry, we don't want this to be user-customisable. You may want to use this closed PR to discuss what you're intending here and why?

[jobs-git]

Various actually, among which is local install organization, install management, common use apps in shared user, ease of data migration and Docker data file app sharing.

You see, almost all apps can be installed in a user defined path, and this appears to be an odd one out. I will open this again as your reasoning seems to be not sound enough? :)

[SMillerDev]

Homebrew is not an app though, it's a package manager. I doubt apt or yum can be installed in a user defined location for example.

[jobs-git]

To add:

1. /home/linuxbrew is a wrong install directory, because /home is usually filled with user-name directories. With this, it appears that linuxbrew wants to be a User.
2. Is this what you intend? Because if this is where its installed, you were trying to make it available globally, which again wrong because of user permission from the original install.
3. Anyway, if its intended for global, you have the wrong directory too, at least you should have set it to /opt/ like all other known developer. Example google places their files in /opt/. NVidia also does that, and other else.

[SMillerDev]

/home/linuxbrew is a wrong install directory, because /home is usually filled with user-name directories. With this, it appears that linuxbrew wants to be a User.

That is exactly the goal. Linuxbrew was started in HPC environments where users only have access to the /home based directories. This way, the admin of the HPC cluster can create a linuxbrew user, and let people use that user instead of allowing everyone to use yum or apt. The fact that this is not according to the usual linux filesystem conventions is intentional, the current way makes it completely independent from the rest of the OS as a feature, not a bug.

[MikeMcQuaid]

@jobs-git All the binaries packages for Linux are built for /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew. Many will not work with a different prefix. As a result, we don't support and have no plans to move to a new prefix for users. If you change HOMEBREW_PREFIX in this way: things will not work as expected.

You can still install Homebrew on Linux to a different path; it's just not supported and a fairly crappy user experience.