Desolate Condition

[Marius Schamschula]

Andrew,

MacPorts provides pre-built packages for more macOS versions than Homebrew.

However, MacPorts is very careful not to provide packages where the upstream license prohibits us from doing so.

Other pre-built packages are not provided if they depend on said packages to be build by our buildbots.

Installing on my Mac using MacPorts is much faster than on my servers under FreeBSD where everything literally has to be build locally, as pre-built packages may be up three months out of date.

> On Jan 26, 2021, at 9:40 AM, Andrew Janke <floss at apjanke.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 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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