A general philosophical question about MacPorts

[S. L. Garwood]

A big thank you to all the people who chimed in and gave me much to think over.
I have used MacPorts since 10.6.8 - it is based on one of my favorite package managers (FreeBSD ports)
I’ve been a long time FreeBSD user, fan, and booster (since 386-bsd believe it or not).
I think for now I’ll keep using MacPorts (in spite of not having boost-1.68) and move off of Linux to a FreeBSD VM for *nix needs.
I am NOT a big fan of systemd so FreeBSD is a no brainer.
Again thanks to all for your comments and suggestions.

> On Feb 20, 2019, at 8:14 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 14:13, S. L. Garwood via macports-users wrote:
>> 
>> So my philosophical question is “Why MacPorts these days?”.
> 
> If your question is: "Why a package manager for Mac these days", just
> a few numbers.
> 
> We don't have any good analytics data, but our competitor saw more
> than 6 million installs (not counting those who opted out) of the most
> popular package in the last year. This at least tells you that there
> is interest in people using a native package manager. I know that our
> traffic runs in many terrabytes, but I forgot even the sample numbers.
> 
> If you don't care about running your software natively, it's better to
> switch to Linux and forget about the expensive hardware.
> 
> I would have left macOS if I didn't have a package manager available,
> the computer would be next-to-useless.
> Even if the software is not packaged (yet), it is orders of magnitude
> easier to build it for Mac than without the package manager.
> 
> Mojca
> 
> 
> Mojca