Improving curl options for CLI install scripts (brew-install)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:39:44 +0000

Hi!

I'm the maintainer for Heroku's Clojure buildpack. It uses the install scripts from clojure/brew-install to install the CLI. I noticed intermittent install failures related to the download of the Clojure tools. I believe most of them could be avoided with a slightly changed curl command line options.

I opened a PR before realizing that PRs will not be accepted, so I'm starting this thread to properly get the discussion going. For reference, the closed PR can be found here: https://github.com/clojure/brew-install/pull/10

I believe these options would improve the download behaviour for all users, but especially when used in automations:

--connect-timeout 3 (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--connect-timeout)
Prevents hanging when server is unreachable.

--fail (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-f)
Exit with error code 22 for HTTP responses with status codes >= 400.

--max-time 60 (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-m)
Maximum time in seconds for the entire transfer operation. Prevents hanging indefinitely with slow connections.

--no-progress-meter (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--no-progress-meter)
Introduced in curl 7.67.0 (Nov 2019). Disables the progress bar for cleaner output. But less drastic than --silent and will still output diagnostic information (i.e. retries).

--retry-max-time 60 (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--retry-max-time)
Retry only within this time period (60 seconds). After this time expires, no more retries will be attempted.

--retry 5 (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--retry)
Introduced in curl 7.12.3 (Dec 2004). Retry up to 5 times on transient errors (timeouts, HTTP 408, 429, 500, 502, 503, 504, 522, 524).

--retry-connrefused (https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--retry-connrefused)
Introduced in curl 7.52.0 (Dec 2016). Consider connection refused as a transient error for --retry.

These are obviously opinionated and my ask is not for these options specifically. Happy to get anything that will improve the situation. :)

Manuel

Suggestion - support legacy Homebrew clients

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 12:35:50 +0000

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/commit/b07685291b65e51e0afc2b6cee91251419e0b3c1 was a breaking change for people deciding to keep using old versions of Brew (which is not particularly easy or popular, but I happen to do it). It's breaking in that an old Brew client querying a newer formula would fail with:

Error: clojure: undefined method `license' for #<Class:0x00007fd2ca91eb38>

This can be trivially addressed by wrapping the license call with an idiomatic if self.respond_to?(:license).

This would allow me to keep using the latest Clojure formulae without having to hack them for such a trivial change.

Would you consider doing it?

Thanks - V

Clojure Q&A - Recent questions tagged brew-install

Improving curl options for CLI install scripts (brew-install)

Suggestion - support legacy Homebrew clients