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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

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AceJohnny2·

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I also use MacPorts, but certainly have often noticed that Homebrew has some package that MacPorts doesn't.

I guess there's nothing stopping me from moving to Homebrew other than familiarity.

I used MacPorts a decade ago, but at some point realized that Homebrew had more packages that were kept consistently up-to-date. Switched and never looked back.

I switched away back to macports when homebrew decided to get rid of formula options. To be honest, I always find homebrew frustrating, it feels that they've often made technical decisions that are not necessarily the best but they've been much more successful at marketing themselves than macports.

If I’m reading the formula docs right, only homebrew-core packages don’t support it (due to CI not testing them). That part does suck, though.

Other taps, like homebrew-ffmpeg, offer a ton of options.

oh, I actually hadn't realized that this is what they settled on in the end. ffmpeg is the quintessential package where options make sense so good that that's still supported.

The other issue I experienced with homebrew around that time were related to having different versions of openssl installed because I had some old codebase I had to run (and for performance reasons didn't want to use docker). But that's definitely a edge case.

I haven't looked at Homebrew since that got started. The philosophical difference at that time was using macports and having a consistent and managed */local/ collection of tools with self contained dependencies vs. adding new tools with dependencies tied to the current Mac OS release.

I still use MacPorts for that reason and it is easy enough to create a local portfile for whatever isn't in Macports.

I find this to be the easy way to manage networked development computers.

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