Publicizing MacPorts

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Apr 19, 2021, at 10:47 AM, Karl-Michael Schindler <karl-michael.schindler at physik.uni-halle.de> wrote:
> 
> Am 19.04.2021 um 14:00 schrieb macports-dev-request at lists.macports.org:
>> 
>> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 13:24:51 +0200
>> From: Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org>
>> Subject: Re: Publicizing MacPorts
>> Message-ID: <CALBOmsbrso9ao2SgVOnVp69hskepHjiWZhSCmwMi_F6CFayqXg at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>> 
>> We should probably be publicising that MacPorts works just fine with
>> M1 more aggressively from the very beginning.
>> 
>> If anyone is willing to volunteer to do PR for MacPorts ...
>> 
>> Mojca
> 
> I intend to do so, probably to a limited extend only. As a first step, I have checked the upstream download pages of our top ten downloads. Less than 5 of them mention macports properly. My next steps is to write to them. I also want to extent the maintainer part of the docs with the direct to port maintainer to check upstream download and install pages.
> 
> Michael.

People don’t install MacPorts or Homebrew just to have a package manager—they install a package manager as a prerequisite to get software that they want.  So getting popular software packages to mention that MacPorts can install that software is very important.  

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.  For example, Homebrew only aims to support recent hardware and up-to-date operating system versions even if users are sometimes left behind.  MacPorts makes far greater efforts to ensure packages work on older hardware and OS versions.  We might do a better job of explaining how MacPorts differs so that users can make an informed choice.

My $0.02 (and Canada doesn’t even have pennies anymore!).

Craig