Publicizing MacPorts

[Jason Liu]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 1:25 PM Craig Treleaven <ctreleaven at cogeco.ca>
wrote:

> 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.
>

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).

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".

========

Personal Anecdote

In one of my former lives, I used to work as a systems administrator for
one of the science departments at a local university, and we used more than
one package management system (PMS) on our Macs. The central,
university-wide IT support group used a combination of Munki and Jenkins to
deploy proprietary commercial software that requires license keys, such as
Adobe and Microsoft products. The department-level IT support staff have
superuser access on each of the computers, but we didn't have the ability
to contribute our own software packages to the central IT's Munki/Jenkins
servers. So, several science departments banded together to also deploy
MacPorts on their departments' Macs, so that we could manage software
packages that were of interest to the individual departments. We were also
aware of other departments that used Homebrew as their departmental PMS. In
fact, the central IT group even added a Homebrew "installer" to the list of
software available through Munki, but refused to add the MacPorts installer
(the sysadmin that was the head of managing the Munki servers loved
Homebrew and Ruby, and absolutely hated Tcl).

This is one of the few instances where I could see the benefit of having
more than one PMS installed on the same machine. But for home computers
that are being managed by a single family member, or even computers
(laptops) that are only ever used by a single person, I highly doubt that
they would willingly go through the hassle of obtaining their software
through more than one PMS.

-- 
Jason Liu


On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 1:25 PM Craig Treleaven <ctreleaven at cogeco.ca>
wrote:

> > 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
>
>
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