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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

I meant, what do you prefer about one vs the other

I use both homebrew and macports. The main benefit with macports for me is the ability to work with different versions at the same time. You can have applications requiring gcc4.5, gcc4.9, and gcc6 installed. The package manager handles most weird special cases and combinations.

Last I used MacPorts I thought it was more separate from MacOS, installing its own components rather than using what comes with the operating system.

I preferred the MacPorts model, but when I used them both, there seemed to be a lot less support compared to Homebrew. When builds stop working, they seemed to be fixed in Homebrew before they were fixed in MacPorts, and Homebrew also seemed to have more current versions of most packages available.

Homebrew also seems to use its own toolchain packages if they're installed. It just doesn't insist on it like MacPorts.

I switched to Brew because I got tired of recompiling from source for every update with MacPorts. As an end-user I don't see the benefit of repeating the same thing N times for N clients versus doing it once, centrally.

Every time "boost" updates, you're stuck recompiling half your ports for the next 20 minutes to use the new library. With Brew, you wait a minute for the new packages to download, and you're done.

MacPorts has been providing binary packages since 2.0, which was released in 2011. Many pre-compiled binaries are even available for old macOS versions back to 10.6. There are only a few ports where the license does not allow binary distribution.

I don't know what to tell you, I like it better. Different flavours for different folks.

I never know what to make of "people still use ______?!" comments

Is there no specific reason why you like it better? Usually you can explain why certain software is preferable to similar software. For example, I use IntelliJ over VS Code for writing Scala because I've had difficulties getting the Ensime extensions to work properly and IntelliJ usually just works. I use VS Code over PyCharm for writing Python code because it's lighter weight and offers 99% of the features that I need. We use Slack at work instead of IRC because there are a lot of non-technical people who need to communicate with the dev team and Slack offers an easy to use UI for organizations.

For myself, I like MacPorts better than Homebrew because in my experience it's subject to less breakage, less flaky interaction with tools like rvm or python, and has a better project philosophy overall. And I personally like that it's not in Ruby but I understand the opposing opinion too ;)

> I never know what to make of "people still use ______?!" comments

Usually people are assuming a network-effect that would make using not-Foo when Foo has "won" problematic. Like, imagine using MySpace as your social network today. It'd be a ghost town and nobody you knew would be on it.

In this case, I imagine people would expect that MacPorts either wouldn't have as wide a selection of packages, or wouldn't keep 100% of its packages constantly up-to-date, or some combination of the two.

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