Maintaining OpenRefine's Homebrew Cask

Maintaining OpenRefine's Homebrew Cask

OpenRefine's presence on Homebrew is found in the Caskroom project, as a "cask", at https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/openrefine.rb.

Terminology: "Caskroom" is the Homebrew extension project where pre-built binaries and GUI applications go, whereas the original, plain old "Homebrew" project is reserved for command-line utilities that can be built from source. So OpenRefine clearly belongs in Caskroom.

When there is a new development release of OpenRefine, a member of the community can submit a pull request with the necessary changes to the OpenRefine cask. Follow the directions on the Homebrew-cask Github - summarized here adapted to OpenRefine:

# install and setup script - only needed once
brew install vitorgalvao/tiny-scripts/cask-repair
cask-repair --help

# use to update openrefine
cask-repair openrefine

The cask-repair tool will prompt you to enter the new version number. It will then use this version number to construct a download URL using the formula (where {version} represents the version number):

https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/releases/download/#{version}/openrefine-mac-#{version}.dmg

Note: It is important that both version number components (the tag and version number) match, so that the formula can find the installer's URL.

Once cask-repair has successfully downloaded the new installer, it will calculate the new SHA-256 fingerprint value and construct a pull request, like this one: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-versions/pull/3319.

Stable vs. development versions

As of the writing of this page, OpenRefine 2.7 is the current stable release version. If a release candidate cycle for a future version is started (e.g., 2.8-RC1)—particularly if the release cycle is projected to be long—we could consider submitting an "openrefine-dev" cask to the "caskroom/homebrew-versions" repository, which houses the "caskroom/versions" tap, reserved for betas and release candidates. This is in contrast to the "caskroom/homebrew-cask" repository, which houses stable releases. We used this approach during the long 2.6-era release candidate cycle.

Once a PR containing the release candidate is merged into caskroom/versions, users will need to add the caskroom/versions tap before they can install the release candidate cask. To add this tap, paste this command into the Terminal:

brew tap caskroom/versions

Users will see output like this:

==> Tapping caskroom/versions
  Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/caskroom/homebrew-versions'...
  remote: Counting objects: 195, done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (193/193), done.
  remote: Total 195 (delta 22), reused 32 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
  Receiving objects: 100% (195/195), 74.13 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
  Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.
  Tapped 0 formulae (213 files, 276.6KB)

Then, users can install OpenRefine with this command:

brew cask install openrefine-dev

Each subsequent release candidate can be updated with cask-repair. Once the final release version is out, maintainers should update the main "openrefine" cask and delete the "openrefine-dev" cask, until a new development cycle begins. We should not leave a stale release candidate version of an already-released app, nor should we update "openrefine-dev" to use the final release version (it would duplicate efforts).