Desolate Condition

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Jan 25, 2021, at 11:41, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> 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.

Whether /usr/local as a dumping ground already on everyone's path is evil or not, I think it's still there in Big Sur, right? (even if it is actually mapped from /System/Volumes/Data/usr/local)

Now maybe Big Sur won't allow open enough permissions for just anyone to write to /usr/local (that at least would be less scary, although a non-dumb admin could set /usr/local and interesting subdirectories to be writable by group admin, which would be a reasonable way of putting stuff in there by members of group admin only (who could put it in there anyway), without having it wide open OR using sudo.

But other than that, just what do you mean by the above? I don't do much homebrew since I mainly do MacPorts and don't want conflicts (a few things need /usr/local, like the Parallels and VirtualBox command line utilities that get put in there, but I don't want to dump too much in there); but there have been a couple of cases where homebrew had something that MacPorts didn't or wasn't as useful to me for.

> 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.

You'd know better about build issues than I, for sure; and although that's a plausible argument in favor of MacPorts, as long as homebrew has some software that MacPorts doesn't (and necessarily that will be the case, since they can also have recipes or whatever they call them for download/install of proprietary software, which MacPorts can't or won't), I don't see them simply going away, nor do I see people that find some benefit in them simply abandoning them.

> So MacPorts, which works great from 10.4 PPC to 11.x arm64, is the place to be.


I'm not ready to switch my main system  (2019 16" MacBook Pro) past Catalina yet, because last I heard there were still some ports that worked there but not on Big Sur.

As far as that goes, I've heard that vpnd (the Apple-provided program that implements VPN server functionality), even though still present, doesn't work past Mojave, so my Mac Mini stays on that until I have an alternative that will work equally well with the laptop, iPad, iPhone, etc, when I'm away.  (I wish Apple would support both server and client L2TPV3 for full broadcast domain functionality in a VPN, but that's another story.) And that Mac Mini (plus a Mojave VM on my laptop) can also provide 32-bit app support, since AFAIK, Wine support for 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit-only OS's still isn't quite there, at least not for a free version.  Presumably there are still a few other 32-bit apps (and ports?) that aren't 64-bit ready yet, too.

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