List of all installed packages in a defunct Homebrew installation

When a package is built from source the flags that were used to build are shown when you do brew info <package>.

In this case: brew info emacs | grep "Built from source"

The normal way to do things is as per your third choice ie use an admin account to install things.

However Homebrew's normal setup does not stick to normal Unix conventions of installing excutables as root or a special user which would allow equal access of the installed code to all users, it is designed so that you do installs as one user and so do not need to use sudo/su for anything. However to do this it needs to make /usr/local writeable by the normal user and you need admin rights to that as in the way you did in the end. I think Homebrew really is designed for a computer which only one person uses and has admin rights.

If you do not want to (or cannot) set your user to admin then there are two ways

1. As per the instructions you quote "If this sucks for you then you can install Homebrew in your home directory" Then the access to ~/usr/local is always for the user
2. A version of your 3. The Homebrew script leaves /usr/local and all under it owned by the user doing the installation. With the admin user you can change the owner to your normal user by chown -R usr /usr/local

Yes there is only one /usr/local in the file system. Each path is unique. The way to have the "same" directory for different users is to put the directories under your home directory e.g. ~/usr/local