Desolate Condition

[Peter West]

I rely mainly on MacPorts, but for a few things, I have found brew more useful; either because a build was available which wasn’t (yet) on MacPorts, or because brew had a more recent version. For example, ImageMagick is at 7.0.10 in brew, but still at 6.9.11 in ports. planck is available in brew, but not in ports, so I installed planck and clojure from brew.

I have always installed brew at /opt/brew and despite warnings, I have not had any trouble with the handful I have.



> On 26 Jan 2021, at 4:15 am, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:
> 
> Being a (retired) programmer and sysadmin (although not significantly conversant with Mac-specific languages or APIs), I don't care too much about simple in itself - but the mere existence of Macs (in addition to predating Linux if you include Macs running older versions of classic Mac OS, like System 6 or earlier) suggests that lots of people do.
> 
> Agreeing that homebrew has issues, I use it minimally (low single digit number of items). But if it comes down to either using homebrew or doing without or building myself and tracking updates myself (or, I suppose, writing a Portfile, but then I'd be on the hook to maintain it), homebrew doesn't necessarily suck THAT bad; it depends on the specific item
> 
>> On Jan 25, 2021, at 12:49, William Santos via macports-users <macports-users at lists.macports.org> wrote:
>> 
>> I’ve never trusted Homebrew. The whole idea of “making it simple” just doesn’t make sense when you’re modifying your system. You don’t want “simple.” Simple breaks things. You want foolproof. Homebrew is foolish, always has been.
>> 
>> I’m a huge fan of both MacPorts and Fink. I use them exclusivly for enhancing my systems.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jan 25, 2021, at 8:41 AM, 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.
>>> 
>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> So MacPorts, which works great from 10.4 PPC to 11.x arm64, is the place to be.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 



--
Peter West
pbw at pbw.id.au
And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”