What should I do to "unpublish" a third-party tap?

[stefanhaller]

Description of issue

Say I maintain a third-party tap, and I want to stop publishing it. The formula in that tap is also in core, and there's no point in maintaining the tap any longer.

Is it enough to simply delete the tap's github repo? What will the user experience be like for users who are using the tap?

The answer to this could be an enhancement request for the documentation at https://docs.brew.sh/How-to-Create-and-Maintain-a-Tap.

[SMillerDev]

You can do disabled! with a replacement reference for core. Or you can make a tap_migrations.json file to redirect users.

[stefanhaller]

Thanks for the fast response!

I tested disabled!, but it seems that it only affects users trying to install the formula from then on. That's not my concern, we have stopped advertising the tap a while ago. I'm mostly concerned about the behavior for existing users who have already installed the formula from the tap; and it seems that disabled! doesn't affect these at all, neither when doing brew update nor when doing brew upgrade. This would be a problem, because we intend to stop updating the tap formula, so users would be stuck on the old version without noticing. (The only effect of disabled! for these users seems to be a warning in brew doctor, which I assume most users don't run regularly.)

Upon further testing I found that deleting the formula from the tap (but keeping the repository around) seems to be the best solution. When I tested this, I automatically got switched over to the core formula of the same name, which is exactly what I want.

[stefanhaller]

Upon further testing I found that deleting the formula from the tap (but keeping the repository around) seems to be the best solution. When I tested this, I automatically got switched over to the core formula of the same name, which is exactly what I want.

Ah, and adding a tap_migrations.json file with the following content:

{
  "myformula": "homebrew/core"
}

which makes it really seamless. Just putting this here in case other users have the same question.

Thanks again for your help.