Best practice guide to write new formula

[albertz]

I want to write a new formula. (For Texmaker specifically, which is based on Qt. But this question should be more generic.)

I guess a good starting point is to use some other similar formula and deviate from that.
I tried to search for depends_on "qt" on GitHub but GitHub cannot handle such searches.
So I clicked a bit around and after a while found qcachegrind.

How should I proceed now? I maybe would do this:

cd ~/.linuxbrew/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core

git checkout -B texmaker

edit Formula/texmaker.rb

brew install texmaker  # test that it works...

git add Formula/texmaker.rb
git commit

git push my-fork

Is this the way to go? But then after the editing, I would switch back to the master branch?

Is there any documentation on how this would be done?

[SMillerDev]

https://docs.brew.sh/Adding-Software-to-Homebrew has the documentation how to add a formula to Homebrew, which is roughly what you did.

[albertz]

Hm but when I do brew install texmaker, it deletes (stashs away) my changes and switches back to the master branch. So that doesn't work. How do I make it work?

[SMillerDev]

Try brew install --build-from-source texmaker like in the document

[albertz]

Ok, I did the first PR: Homebrew/homebrew-core#90230

[albertz]

Note that I had problems with Qt 6 installed via Homebrew. It uses the wrong prefix (/home/linuxbrew). I also could not install Qt from source with similar problems. I worked around that for now by creating a /home/linuxbrew symlink.

I wanted to post an issue but that doesn't work currently with a 400 error.