Sweet! I'm completely unfamiliar with Ruby, which I think is half the problem (edit: and git/github, which is probably the other half). If there's a different file(s) to download for that fork, I can't find them -- everything in the github project seems to link back to https://gist.github.com/323731, which is the Intel build (edit: e.g., the Readme.md file). I tried replacing my copy of brew with https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew, but that complained that it can't find brew.h ("no such file to load -- brew.h" on line 77) ... at that point, I decided that I'd spent too much time trying to get pianobar upgraded and moved on to other things.
First, get the latest version of Xcode that's compatible with your OS. You can find older versions of Xcode by clicking on "Developer Tools" on the right side of this page: http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/w... (you may need a free Apple developer account).
sceaga has a branch for Tiger and another branch for PPC, I happened to be using Tiger on PPC, so I picked the Tiger branch. From https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew , you want to click "Switch Branches" on the left, choose your branch, then click "Download on the right. Or, just click one of these:
I opted to install into my home directory, rather than /usr/local, so to get it into place, all I had to do was extract the tarball, put the resulting directory where I wanted it (I called it "brew"), and then add $HOME/brew/bin and $HOME/brew/sbin to my $PATH.
You should now be able to type "brew" and see its usage message.
At this point, "brew install" worked for me, except that it wasn't chmodding binaries as executable. At the end of installations, it was giving a bunch of messages like "file: invalid option -- h". This appears to be because my 10.4 PPC version of "file" doesn't support "-h". To fix this, I installed the gnu version instead:
brew install libmagic
chmod +x ~/brew/Cellar/libmagic/5.04/bin/file
brew link libmagic #libmagic doesn't add gnu "file" to your PATH without this command, because it doesn't want to override the OS-provided "file"
After that, homebrew seems to work, with the following caveats:
1. "brew update" (which updates the package manager
itself) will try to update from the non-PPC, upstream
version of homebrew. I just don't use this command.
2. "brew doctor" complains that my gcc is too old
(because I can't use the latest Xcode) and can't
seem to detect that I have X11 installed, even
though I do.
I've also found the people in #machomebrew on irc.freenode.net to be a helpful bunch, although not many have experience with homebrew on PPC.
You were my favorite non-girlfriend-or-business-partner person today!
I had a busy day so I didn't get to try this out until just now. Somehow, despite staring at the github project page and clicking on everything that I thought was clickable and grinding my teeth in frustration, I never noticed the "Downloads" button. So now I feel like an idiot, but I'm an idiot with a working homebrew. Thank you. :-)
Whoops; for the record, "file" is not written by GNU. It was originally written by Ian Darwin and is currently maintained by Christos Zoulas, see http://www.darwinsys.com/file/
