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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.

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