Desolate Condition

[Andrew Janke]

On 1/26/21 3:50 PM, Nils Breunese wrote:
> Christopher Nielsen <mascguy at rochester.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
> I think it’s a great idea to always send pull requests to update upstream docs and readme files with installation instructions for MacPorts when you start maintaining a port. So, to all maintainers: take a look at the ports you maintain and whether the upstream docs and readme have installation instructions for MacPorts.
>
> Nils.

Possibly relevant: I'm co-maintainer of Octave.app, a "native" Mac app
distribution of GNU Octave (https://octave-app.org/). It's currently
built on top of Homebrew.

I'm tentatively planning on migrating Octave.app to be built on top of
MacPorts in the near future. Partially because I think MacPorts is a
more stable, configurable, "pro" tool more suitable to building
redistributable apps (which is explicitly not supported by Homebrew),
but mostly because I refuse to upgrade from macOS 10.14 (because I'm an
Aperture user) and Homebrew's going to drop support for 10.14.

The way this thing works is that I set up a whole Homebrew installation
under a custom prefix at "/Applications/Octave-<version>.app" and then
wrap that up as an app bundle.

Do y'all have any advice for me?

If this transition happens, a "Powered by MacPorts!" banner goes on the
bottom of our website. I have absolutely no clue how many users we have,
but I know that at least a couple hundred European college students
along with some scientists in the US are using it.

Cheers,
Andrew