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I am unable to pin MacTeX in Terminal with the command brew pin mactex:

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It would ordinarily be not a problem. However when I try to upgrade formulas using brew upgrade or brew upgrade --cask it tries to upgrade MacTeX also, which I do not want. Any help is appreciated.

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    When adding Terminal output, please copy/paste as text and format as code, it's much easier to read that way (and also accessible to people using screen readers).
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Jun 5, 2022 at 8:15

2 Answers 2

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MacTeX is installed as a Homebrew cask, casks can't be pinned though (see https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/49127#issuecomment-401501245 and https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/issues/90242)

A huge chunk of casks auto-update and we can’t stop that. So pin would at best be inconsistent and not work in a lot of cases.

There is a user-written extension called homebrew-cask-upgrade which seems to address this issue, but I have no experience with it and it may bring along other issues.

For your specific scenario, I would just install MacTeX directly from TUG and avoid any auto-updating triggered by Homebrew. Or, if you don't need the GUI applications bundled with MacTeX, use brew install texlive which just installs the non-GUI binaries and can be pinned.

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    Is it really MacTeX that is installed by Homebrew or TeX Live?
    – Herb Schulz
    Commented Jun 5, 2022 at 13:55
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    @HerbSchulz See first few lines of the respective cask. MacTeX is TeX Live with macOS GUI components. But there is brew install texlive which doesn't include the GUI parts.
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Jun 5, 2022 at 13:58
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    MacTeX also installs a data structure that running apps in Terminal easy and standardizes GUI setup.
    – Herb Schulz
    Commented Jun 5, 2022 at 20:22
  • Thank you @nohillside and HerbSchulz. In the future I will be switching to Linux and I hope with the new experience will come new niggles and issues. Hehe. For the present I am only upgrading the formulae that needs to be upgraded by name.
    – banuyayi
    Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 9:03
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I posted another workaround.

You can simply remove the cask file. Keep in mind that this will break all other operations with this cask.

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