This week I learned that some packages in homebrew are being disabled / marked as not maintained at a certain date. I encountered it while setting up a dev environment at work.

I was trying to install libav with homebrew

brew install libav

but I am getting this error

libav has been disabled because it is not maintained upstream

The solution is to open the brew config for libav with

brew edit libav

Comment the line that begins with disable! date

# disable! date: "2022-07-31", because: :unmaintained

Save the file and rerun brew install. It should now be successful.

Well that worked fine but I'm thinking maybe there is a reason why the library has been disabled and maybe there is already an alternative but that could be atopic for another article. See you around.