This is a lesson about mental models.

From the brew devs' point of view it doesn't make sense because they are different commands.

From the end user's point of view it makes perfect sense because brew is just a tool to install shit with and they do not wish to expend any brain cycles on it. That includes remembering whether this particular tool calls it update or upgrade.

You know the second point of view is right because if you type one without arguments, it asks you whether you meant to type the other one.

But they're too autistic to realize what that means and actually fix the interface.

    brew update - update brew
    brew update thing - update thing

Done.

Similarly, as someone who only rarely uses it, a huge frustration is that when I do, it invariably wants to update 100+ packages. I never asked for it to do that and I was happy with whatever was installed right before it decided to do that and block my system for 20 minutes.

Again, brew devs do not understand their audience.

Disagree. I've been a user for a lot of years and prefer the apt-like distinction between the commands. They do different things.

> Similarly, as someone who only rarely uses it, a huge frustration is that when I do, it invariably wants to update 100+ packages. I never asked for it to do that and I was happy with whatever was installed right before it decided to do that and block my system for 20 minutes.

There's a setting for that, no need for it to keep being a huge frustration.

Good interfaces have 1 to 1 mappings between the available levers and the user's model of the tasks they wish and need to perform.

Bad interfaces require you to care about implementation details that are arbitrary. Like whether the index is local or remote, whether it is stale or fresh, etc.

This is not an opinion, this is what decades of product design lessons tell us.

I don't use brew enough to ever go dig into settings, I wouldn't even know where to go find them, nor do I wish to expend cycles to go find them. They shouldn't design their software with such shitty defaults. All they're doing is ensuring my opinion of it gets worse every time I use it.

> Good interfaces have 1 to 1 mappings between the available levers and the user's model of the tasks they wish and need to perform.

It already does. Sometimes I want to update. Sometimes I want to upgrade. This model matches the models of the other package managers I've used, for the most part.

> I don't use brew enough to ever go dig into settings, I wouldn't even know where to go find them, nor do I wish to expend cycles to go find them. They shouldn't design their software with such shitty defaults.

That's fine—but I guess it's not a huge frustration, then.

It's a huge frustration that happens whenever I try to use it, which is not often enough for me to do anything about it aside from curse their idiocy.

As for your mental model, you've adapted to the implementation details of specific package managers. This is just Stockholm lite.

It's not, it's you that persists in wanting update and upgrade to do the same.

They don't do the same, but if you want, you can completely forget about update and just use upgrade, it does an update behind the scenes. But don't try to force kill update just because YOU have no use for it.