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Comment by arandomhuman | Hacker News Reader

If macs supported PKGBUILDs like Pacman with a similar level of performance and there were correctly maintained packages for core programs I'd feel like using a mac would have a lot less compromises for convenience.

Homebrew is great and the formulae are maintained really well but the simplicity of PKGBUILDS, the fast syncing, and lack of cognitive burden of recalling multiple arguments/flags for package managers make me wish pacman just worked on macs.

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The vanilla pacman will not work on macos as expected but there are attempts [1],[2] to make it works with some modifications/hacks.

[1] https://github.com/liudongmiao/pacman [2] https://github.com/kladd/pacman-osx

There have been a few attempts at this. I think some of them may even be working.

Is MacPorts not the same? Genuinely asking.

The concept is the same (given a definition file, build a package from a central repo, aka ports-like), but one of the features of PKGBUILD has is that it's easy to build an ad-hoc package outside the main tree. For example, you can download a bundle of PKGBUILD and `makepkg` in any directory to build a package.

In other ports-like build systems, this can be a bit more complicated. For example, MacPorts allows you to use a local repository, but it requires configuring that local repository in `/opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf` and `portindex` it beforehand before MacPorts could pick it up. Some others don't support building out of the main tree at all.

Personally, out of all ports-like building systems, I like MacPorts' Portfile the most. It's similar to FreeBSD Ports' BSD Makefile (MacPorts was created by Jordan Hubbard who also co-created FreeBSD Ports) but using DSL via Tcl interp instead of being a shell script (POSIX shell in the case of Alpine's APKBUILD, bash in the case of others). From my experience, the syntax is very nice to work with, though you need to know a bit of Tcl for a non-trivial package.

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