homebrew-cask/doc/faq/rejected-casks.md

Rejected Casks

Before submitting a Cask to any of our repos, you must read our documentation on acceptable Casks and perform a (at least quick) search to see if there were any previous attempts to introduce it.

Common reasons to reject a Cask entirely:

• We have strong reasons to believe including the Cask can put the whole project at risk. Happened only once so far, with Popcorn Time.
• The app is a trial version, and the only way to acquire the full version is through the Mac App Store (documented).
  • Similarly (and trickier to spot), the app has moved to the Mac App Store but still provides old versions via direct download. We reject these in all official repos so users don’t get stuck using an old version, wrongly thinking they’re using the most up-to-date one (which, amongst other things, might be a security risk).
• The app is both open-source and CLI-only (i.e. it only uses the binary artifact). In that case, and in the spirit of deduplication, submit it first to Homebrew. If it is rejected there, you may then try again in Homebrew-Cask (link us to the issue on Homebrew so we can see their reasoning for rejection).
  • Similarly, the app already exists in Homebrew, and the Homebrew-Cask version wouldn’t add anything to it.
• The app has been rejected before due to an issue we cannot fix, and this new submission doesn’t fix that . An example would be the first submission of soapui, whose installation problems were not fixed in the two subsequent submissions (#9969, #10606).
• The Cask is a duplicate. These submissions mostly occur when the token reference was not followed.
• The download URL for the app is both behind a login/registration form and from a host that differs from the homepage, meaning users can’t easily verify its authenticity. alehouse/homebrew-unofficial is a sister repo where you may wish to submit your cask.
• The author has specifically asked us not to include it.

Common reasons to reject a Cask from the main repo:

• The app is an alternate edition or a legacy or development version of a Cask already in the main repo, and as such should be submitted to caskroom/versions (documented). Common offenders include Sublime Text 3 and Firefox Developer Edition.