I was unaware of being placed in the admin group by default. Is the admin group similar to the wheel group or is there also a wheel group for sudo access?

And yes, I very seldom run scripts copied from somebody else so when I do, I make sure I know what is being run. Granted, I'm a Linux and Windows user so the OSX philosophy might be different.

The admin group is what it's used for sudo by default.

You mean installing Homebrew itself? Because if you're running "sudo brew install foo" you're doing it wrong.

Yes. And nope, I'm not referring to 'sudo brew install'.

The main homebrew page says, 'run this ruby script'.

The ruby script is available at: https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go

The script includes a sudo command.

To be fair, I hadn't read the script in detail when I wrote my post, just far enough to see there was a definition of a sudo function. On review, it looks like they either call it to chmod/chgrp HOMEBREW_PREFIX (sometimes), or run sudo to create the directories.

Fair enough. I think everyone agrees that the "download and execute a random gist" method of installation is not great.

I don't see any reason why it's worse than running a binary installer, and people seem to object to that a lot less for some reason.

Homebrew fails if you attempt to run it with sudo.

See my comment above. I'm not referring to running 'sudo homebrew ...', I'm talking about the installation, which has to run sudo to change some permissions in HOMEBREW_PREFIX.