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.