I can answer that that precisely: 4. I was testing Homebrew in a virtual machine to see how it compared to MacPorts, Nix, and Pkgsrc at the time and can restore the virtual machine with Terminal still open and my complete session viewable.

Sure the "fix" is simple. But when I'm evaluating something I'm possibly going to make part of my life, I have to ask myself: how many more surprises await me?

Based on my evaluation of the available package managers, my ranking (for macOS) is:

1) MacPorts 2) Pkgsrc 3) Homebrew 4) Nix

I've encountered that error too. Sometimes, I am just seeing if stuff I want to play with are out there in brew land.