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Comment by beowulfey | Hacker News Reader

It works well now though—do you prefer any of the other package managers still?

I use both MacPorts and Homebrew. By and large, I prefer MacPorts (because I can pin a package and it will stay pinned, whereas Homebrew will upgrade a package if it happens to be a dependency of something else) but there are numerous packages and casks only available in Homebrew.

If I could switch entirely to MacPorts, I would.

I wonder why there aren't more "casks" for MacPorts. On my work MacBook, I've got Firefox, Google Chrome, Orbstack, and Visual Studio Code installed via brew casks, and none of them are present in the MacPorts catalog. Maybe I should step up and learn how to package things for MacPorts...

I think that, by and large, MacPorts wants to ultimately build things. I was just looking at the MacVim port and it does not have a way of downloading the Release from GitHub (as far as I can tell). It will download a precompiled binary from the MacPorts build farm, but it has Sparkle disabled, etc., so it is managed fully from MacPorts.

It would be an interesting discussion to have, as they do have some of that sort of thing (the 1Password CLI, for example), but I don’t know what the general policy would be.

I’d love to see MacPorts get more funding for build resources and to potentially add that, because the way that Homebrew works occasionally leaves things broken (`pipx` venvs are a great example).

I ended up having far less use for one, and the tools I do use come from cross-platform package managers like cpan and pip.

…Like I said, language X developers want all their tools to be written in language X, and their package systems too.

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