A general philosophical question about MacPorts

[macports at raf.org]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On Feb 19, 2019, at 07:13, S. L. Garwood wrote:
> 
> > So my philosophical question is “Why MacPorts these days?”. 
> 
> Same reason as always: to help you install software on your Mac. If
> you prefer installing software in a VM running a different OS, by all
> means do so, but it's not the same thing.

Another philosophical question you might want to ask
yourself is "Why macOS these days?" That's only a bit
facetious (a large bit, admittedly). If you mostly use
a VM, you might be better off just installing that OS
on the hardware and replacing macOS. Just a thought.

The only reason I use macos at all is because it's
unixy. I spend most of my time in full screen X11 using
many programs and languages from macports. Even without
X11, macports makes it easy to install and upgrade lots
of software that would otherwise be cumbersome to
install individually, let alone keep up to date. I
wasn't even aware that Apple supported macports. Apple
doesn't really support X11 like it used to either and
it doesn't work quite as well as it does under Linux
but it'll do.

>From my point of view, macports makes it possible to
keep using macOS. Without it, Linux in a VM or
replacing macOS altogether would be hard to resist.

cheers,
raf