macports rot

[Nils Breunese]

Rainer Müller wrote:

> Somehow the Homebrew community managed to get their ubiquitous marketing
> on almost every software project website. Compare this with the MacPorts
> website, which has not seen any redesign in more than 10 years...
> 
> Although a good package management system should not need to advertise
> itself, as every software would be available without users being told
> where to look – the package manager should be their first choice.

But you need to know about this package manager first then. And be convinced into installing and using it. I found out about the existence of package managers on Mac (I guess it was Fink for me at the time) through installation instructions for some tool I wanted to install.

When I started to maintain some packages for MacPorts I also made an effort to do pull requests for the install docs to add instructions for installing via MacPorts (for instance [0]). I think this is very important PR for a package manager, apart from its own website.

For instance, yesterday I wanted to try out Hugo. It’s available in MacPorts, but the Hugo site only mentions Homebrew, binary download and building from source as installation options [1]. I think it might pay off if maintainers would pay more attention to this.

Nils.

[0] https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#getting-started-macports-cli-installation
[1] https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing#pick-your-method
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20181206/113f9cbe/attachment-0001.html>