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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/19/21 3:54 PM, Craig Treleaven
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:92E30ED5-BAB1-425D-86F3-CB7F01F632F1@cogeco.ca">
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<div class="">On Apr 19, 2021, at 2:51 PM, Jason Liu <<a
href="mailto:jasonliu@umich.edu" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">jasonliu@umich.edu</a>> wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<div class="">
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
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letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent:
0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
text-decoration: none;" class="">On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at
1:25 PM Craig Treleaven <<a
href="mailto:ctreleaven@cogeco.ca" target="_blank"
class="" moz-do-not-send="true">ctreleaven@cogeco.ca</a>>
wrote:</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="caret-color: rgb(0,
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204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="">Also, why should we consider that MacPorts
is in competition with Homebrew? Both MacPorts and
Homebrew seem to have a sufficient number of
contributors to keep going for the foreseeable future.
Nether packaging system has to "win" nor does the other
have to "lose". The projects do have differing
philosophies that may make one more suitable than the
other for particular users.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal;
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</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal;
font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent:
0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
text-decoration: none;" class="">Although this is a nice
sentiment, I believe the reality is that MacPorts is in
fact in competition with Homebrew. And not just Homebrew,
but with other package managers as well, such as Munki,
and even to some extent other deployment products such as
Jamf/Casper and Jenkins. My belief is that the total
number of systems running macOS as its operating system is
the entire "pie" of systems that could potentially use one
of these macOS package managers. In addition, the vast
majority of users will only use one package management
product, hence my opinion of why it's a pie with a limited
number of potential users that gets divided up. The
possible exception to only using one product per machine
might be, say, in an enterprise setting (you can read my
personal anecdote below for an example).</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal;
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</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal;
font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent:
0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
text-decoration: none;" class="">In addition, it has
traditionally been the case that package management
systems say on their websites that installing multiple
package managers on one machine can cause problems... e.g.
MacPorts doesn't work well with Fink and Homebrew,
Homebrew doesn't work well with Fink and MacPorts, etc.
People on this mailing list are tech savvy enough to deal
with the potential conflicts that might occur regarding
environment variables, $PATH order, etc. but the vast
majority of users won't be, and thus would stick to using
only one package manager. If one product "wins" by getting
installed on a particular system, then the others "lose”.</div>
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<div class=""><br class="">
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I wasn’t trying to suggest that a user should install multiple
package managers.
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">MacPorts needs contributors and maintainers to go
forward. We don’t _need_ users! It is the same amount of work
to create or update a package regardless of the number of users.
Several of the packages I maintain have very few reported
users…sometimes only me.
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">As long has we have a decent volume of people
contributing to MacPorts the project will continue. As a port
maintainer, it is gratifying to think that my work may be
benefiting others. It is not that important whether it is 10
people or 10,000. I think that many of our maintainers do so
because they need the ports that they are working on. IOW,
they’d do so even if there were no other users. Obviously,
several of our most prolific maintainers have different
motivations.</div>
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</blockquote>
That would be my concern here. Keep the project alive with an active
maintainer community. But I'm a bit different; I want to do work on
projects that are visible and actively helping users; that's
(partially) how I decide where to put my time.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:92E30ED5-BAB1-425D-86F3-CB7F01F632F1@cogeco.ca">
<div class="">
<div class="">To be cynical, I think Homebrew users are more
commonly command line newbies and therefore probably generate
a high volume of simple and repetitive questions. AKA
’support desk hell’! Perhaps we are fortunate that MacPorts
users tend to be a little more savvy. ;)</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
Speaking as a former Homebrew core maintainer – not actually the
case! We got almost no 101-level support requests; Google and
StackOverflow take care of those just fine. The majority of requests
coming in to Homebrew are actually PRs to bump versions on packages
(a significant number of Homebrew users like to be contributors too,
and there's almost a competition to get to new package releases
first), and most of the rest are semi-obscure build and linkage
problems, problems with macOS's System Integrity Protection stuff,
or legit workflow issues with the tools.<br>
<br>
Though I agree that MacPorts is definitely the "pro" product in this
area, so I expect its users are even more savvy.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Andrew<br>
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