running macports along with homebrew

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Feb 14, 2018, at 2:46 PM, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2018-02-14, at 5:56 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> We will definitely never offer a user-facing feature for building the HEAD version of a port's code. 
> 
> I completely recognize why you stick with this, I totally get it, but this caution is costing MacPorts both users and mindshare to do so... some people want this, and so will go elsewhere to get it.
> 
> In a recent poll <https://www.slant.co/versus/1588/1674/~macports_vs_homebrew>, homebrew was recommended 375 to 25 over MacPorts.
> 
> Most developers who offer their software for download and building manually recommend homebrew for supporting software. Almost nobody recommends MacPorts.

sure, it's not clear that that's because MacPorts doesn't provide un-repeatable HEAD builds.

> Reasons for this are likely to be:
> 
> 1. a one-line copy-paste install script that can be embedded into any webpage.
> 
> 2. symlinks into /usr/local therefore:
>    a) no adjustments needed to path
>    b) no need for sudo
>    c) third-party apps, libraries, and xcode projects can be downloaded and built or run, and the system looks there by default, so need no modification to build or run. 
> 
> 3. you can easily build the +HEAD version of a git project to try out newest changes as a beta tester
> 
> IMHO, the two biggest reasons homebrew is heavily recommended are #1 and #2c. I think it's just good that we all know this.
> 
> Question:
> 
> Is there anything that would stop someone from installing macports into /usr/local ,

yes, the configure script purposely errors out if you try to do this (I ran MacPorts this way for a /long/ time - there's no real benefit from doing so).

> should they desire to do so? That would fix up all the issues with sudo, path, and 2c.

MacPorts already works with non-sudo if you want (we could probably make it easier).
-- 
Daniel J. Luke