Desolate Condition

[Andrew Janke]

On 1/26/21 10:12 AM, Christopher Nielsen wrote:
>> /Ken Cunningham wrote:
>> /
>> homebrew is in shambles.
>>
>> their long-touted "no-sudo" and "no PATH" advantage from installing
>> into /usr/local has been eliminated by Apple as the horrible security
>> threat it always was. They have to retool into /opt/homebrew and make
>> 10,000 builds respect the build args now.
>>
>> They stripped out all their universal handling code a few years ago,
>> can't put it back, and so can't do the critical universal builds any
>> more. They tell everyone universal is wasteful, lipo things manually,
>> and run the x86_64 homebrew on Apple Silicon.
>>
>> So MacPorts, which works great from 10.4 PPC to 11.x arm64, is the
>> place to be.
>
> Personnally, I’ve never actually tried HomeBrew, as I didn’t want
> anything installed into core OS areas. And after choosing  MacPorts
> years ago - 10+ at this point? - I’ve always been very happy with the
> experience. Enough so that I’m finally giving back, as a contributor!
>
> One advantage that HomeBrew does have, though, is cachet: There are so
> many times when articles - or even organizations, such as Google -
> simply recommend using HomeBrew… with no mention of MacPorts.
>
> So, my feeling is that we need to up our public relations game. Do we
> have an active social media presence, for example? (Twitter in
> particular?)
>
> Of note, while I’m not an expert in social media relations, I’d
> happily volunteer to help with it.
>
> Thoughts?

Hi! Long-time user of both Homebrew and MacPorts here; former Homebrew
maintainer.

It's definitely a PR issue; Homebrew is winning on that front.

IMHO, the other thing is that Homebrew is /fun/ to use and accessible to
less-technical users. Friendlier command output, low-jargon
documentation, sense of humor, fun emojis. MacPorts feels like more of a
"pro" thing and serious sysadmin tool, and its command output can be
kind of technical and intimidating. I think the Homebrew approach is
attractive to a lot of general Mac users, especially those approaching a
package manager for the first time.

Another big thing is that Homebrew ships binaries for everything, so you
can do a full Homebrew install of a big toolchain in just a few minutes,
where it might take hours to compile. MacPorts still builds everything
from source, right?

Those are the reasons I always recommend Homebrew to new Mac package
manager users, even though I think both are good tools.

Cheers,
Andrew
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