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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

Macports

Yeah, macports still works fine. It has an equivalent to the OpenBSD flavors and does versioning fine. The only pain point is OS upgrades.

And the fact that it "needs" Xcode installed.

If my pre-coffee memory is correct, Macports only needs command-line tools for XCode.

    xcode-select --install

That said, MacPorts is often opinionated, e.g. they package certain versions of some software and not others.

I just said what's on the "Installing MacPorts" section of the site: https://www.macports.org/install.php

> 1. Install Xcode and the Xcode Command Line Tools

It does not, it does need the "command line tools" installed. Certain ports require full Xcode but not too many.

Seconded, I've never had a problem with Macports, it just works.

One should bear in mind that it seems MacPorts takes a much more puritan approach to packaging than Homebrew, as this 18 month old ticket asking for awscli v2 (and its comment thread) shows: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60452

I didn't dig into the process for a user to add their own ports, or share new ports with a team, in order to more fully compare the two packagers, but that ticket stood out to me

I don’t get how that thread demonstrates what you say. It just looks like awscli 2 is a pain to package; what am I missing?

Well, one will observe that brew manages to package it, without any similar stone throwing about the project's "hatred for pypi" or other meta commentary. It seems every project has *some* kind of quirk, but if the packaging system pays that cost once, then its users get "brew install awscli" instead of waiting 18 months for the AWS team to "see the error of their ways" or whatever one is expecting to change about that situation

I apologize if "puritan" was too emotionally loaded of a word that hurt people's feelings -- I didn't think "strict" was the right word but maybe I should have used "opinionated?"

My read of that ticket is it's a bunch of people saying "this looks hard, I don't want to do it." But if someone wrote a (good) pull request, I expect MacPorts would accept it.

The thing about MacPorts is that it's a very community-driven project. Things happen when someone decides to go do them.

(Individual maintainers are sometimes opinionated, but I wouldn't say they speak for the whole of MacPorts.)

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