Homebrew’s great migration: Moving to GitHub packages with zero downtime

Mike McQuaid discusses the following: the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available, how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer), what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime, and how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on.

By Mike McQuaid

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March 21, 2023

Homebrew (the open source software package manager) had a problem.

We had a hard, three-month deadline to migrate all our package hosting from Bintray (which was shutting down) to something else. We had several options, no full-time engineers and no explicit agreement on how we should move forward.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the following:

– the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available

– how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer)

– what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime

– how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on

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