Hacker News Reader

Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

The once-ubiquitous open-source package manager for macOS, MacPorts, is basically a Tcl app.

That is to say, its packages are Tcl.

I haven't used it in many years, as is has been largely replaced by Homebrew, which uses Ruby.

(I once maintained a MacOS port of a good-sized scientific analysis package. Hundreds of MacPorts packages, I have debugged.)

https://www.macports.org/

View on HN

In the 1990s, an awful lot of Linux apps were Tk/Tcl. People complained then about them not being "native", but they were slimmer and better performing than the typical Java or Electron app of today.

It’s only because TK was so butt-ugly

Tk’s look was based directly on the Motif widget toolkit that was dominant on UNIX workstations at the time it was created.

Yes, unfortunately, though Tk wasn't quite as bad as the dystopian Brutalist Soviet horror of Motif.

You should see Windows {10,11} or Android. /s

Agreed, but you can stylize them now with ttk (https://tkdocs.com/tutorial/styles.html and https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Ttk). There are other ways, too, but I do not have the source code at hand at the moment (as I have done this before).

It was better looking than Athena or OpenLook, which were your other two free options back then. GTK+ wasn't around, QT was mostly unknown and had license issues anyway, and Motif cost money.

MacPorts has far more packages than Homebrew and was implemented by the creator of the original FreeBSD ports system, who was also an employee on Apple’s UNIX team. MacPorts is the standard macOS package manager.

What do you mean by “standard”?

I like MacPorts, but most macOS using developers I’ve conversed with over the past 12+ years never heard of it, while all of them used Homebrew. Maybe it depends on what developer circles one inhabits.

I have only ever used macports, but my first and only MacBook was salvaged from bigcorp IT, and is a 2009 model so homebrew is too new for it.

I’ve dabbled in BSD before and I can definitely see the correspondence between Macports and freeBSD ports. I assume homebrew tries to be more similar to apt or yum.

Yes, one of several nice things about MacPorts is the continued support for older macs, macOS/OSX versions.

MacPorts is a godsend on older Macs.

Takes forever to compile stuff on a G3 though :)

How did people compile emacs on 2 cores in the old days? :O

Just a play on “ed is the standard text editor”.

But, by all measures, MacPorts is more standard than Homebrew. Such as being implemented by an Apple employee who also created the official (source-based) package manager for the most popular BSD.

Homebrew definitely has a lot more market share though, much to my chagrin. The only other MacPorts users I’ve met in person are people I convinced to switch.

> MacPorts is the standard macOS package manager.

No, it's not. macOS does not have a standard package manager.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Worth noting https://developer.apple.com/documentation/packagedescription...:

    case aptItem
    case brewItem 
    case nugetItem
    case yumItem

>:(

I have always preferred BSD-style ports trees, which emphasize building the packages from source code. Easier to patch the source when needed, when adapting (porting) the package to a new environment.

This made it easier to adapt large collections of packages to new versions of macOS. Or to adopt the latest version of a package. Easier for integration testing for my application.

It doesn't surprise me at all that MacPorts has a larger collection of packages than HomeBrew.

My other ride is Gentoo Linux. :-)

I don't think homebrew has replaced MacPorts. I suspect that MacPorts has more ports.

TCL modules are still pretty widely used in HPC-like environments unfortunately:

https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/stable/modulefile.html

Though there is a replacement that uses Lua which is somewhat better than TCL:

https://lmod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

TCL is also pretty universally used in EDA scripting. It's pretty bad, though I guess it is better than all the Bash that EDA devs tend to use too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com