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Comment by marxisttemp | Hacker News Reader

MacPorts is always waiting for you with more packages, a better design, and Jordan Hubbard’s history with BSD/Apple :)

so many projects release only formulas for homebrew. I keep both and try to use McPorts first.

Most homebrew users started in macports, or fink. Very few I talk to (admittedly not many and curmugeons) want to go back.

Key difference is Mac ports keeps its tree separate in /opt. This means things take longer initially to install because it can’t just leverage system stuff already there. Upside is greater reliability because it doesn’t have to worry about a system update changing its dependencies.

I prefer the greater reliability of macports.

> Key difference is Mac ports keeps its tree separate in /opt

What do you mean by this? brew has been linking from /opt/homebrew for years now.

The person you're responding to may have been using homebrew on Intel. It's been in /opt on ARM since inception on ARM.

I did not know about the new directory practice, thanks.

From what their site says it looks like it was done this way to keep ARM native stuff separate from old intel code which can still work under Rosetta. But I don't see any indication homebrew stopped linking system libraries as a matter of course (correct me if I'm wrong).

MacPorts makes a point of not doing this. /opt/local is its own universe and dependencies can be upgraded more or less aggressively than Apple's. https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#syslibs

I much rather them use system libraries than build parallel libs that don’t go through Apple’s vetting / changes. This has worked well for me in practice. I’ve actually never run into an issue where the system library got updated and that broke homebrew’s apps.

That seems like a totally valid perspective. Macports page I linked claims that Apple is often too slow to update, and in some cases only does so when there is a security breach. I can’t vouch for if that’s true. In my experiments maybe 10 yrs ago it took substantially longer for me to install a certain set of packages on Macports vs homebrew due to the parallel library thing. But I had had some broken packages with brew and found Macports more reliable.

Does seem like something Apple should fund / handle IMO.

That was probably true in homebrew’s first year. At this point I would be shocked if more than a fraction of a percent of homebrew users have ever even heard of macports or fink.

On reflection I think you are very probably right. I should have thought more about my origin story before posting.

Once, long ago...

On an old Macbook I keep around for various rare offline tasks, I actually did go back to MacPorts from Homebrew. Chief reason being: Homebrew doesn't support old versions of the OS so I was SOL trying to install a new package on it. The backwards compatibility is a nice feature!

My current machine is also not on the latest so I wonder if an attempt to brew update would nag me now...

I was wondering recently if there are any downsides of using MacPorts and homebrew for different packages on the same system. Homebrew excels at keeping all my single binary CLI tools up to date, but I don't particularly like how it forces me to upgrade more complex software packages like MySQL or FFmpeg constantly.

There is also the issue, that my iMac is stuck on Ventura, and soon won't be supported by homebrew anymore.

The approach of Mac ports and Homebrew have been the complete opposite when Homebrew came into existence. Mac ports tried to make packages compatible with whatever Apple shipped, aka their own twists on Perl, python, OpenSSL etc. While Homebrew tried to make macOS compatible with whatever existed out there. As a developer Homebrew gave you a more up to date and fully functional experience. Can’t tell you how it is today since Apple removed all interpreters and such from macOS.

It's also a worse design in some aspects, so not a clear winner

For example?

- too much sudo friction

- homebrew's design of having a single app's folder is better, e.g., can use your basic file manager to see the total size

- updates requiring manual inervention

- fewer/less updated packages (mabye due to the previous deficiency?)

- large duplicate database wasting space (and think it's even uncompressed) (brew got better when it moved to it API)

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