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Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

They spent months fuding MacPorts before putting in place exactly what MacPort was doing because it turns out it’s the right solution and despite that the ergonomic is still garbage (try installing packages outside of the default folder for a good laugh).

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Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience.

(Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)

Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity.

Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.

Found it because I was curious: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e...

Here are the comparisons to other package managers:

> Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

vs MacPorts registry which used its own homebrewed (lol) Receipts files in 2009, and now uses a SQLite DB: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#i...

> I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink).

vs MacPorts installs to `/opt/local` as root.

> Why Not MacPorts?

> =================

> 1. MacPorts installs its own libz, its own openssl, etc. It is an autarky.

> This makes no sense to me. OS X comes with all that shit.

> 2. MacPorts support Tiger, and PPC. We don't, so things are better optimised.

There is no “Why Not Fink?” section.

And because I didn't know the word autarky: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky

From 2009, so before my involvement. I'll note that this also says a bunch of things that aren't true in current-day Homebrew (Casks, for example, are distributions of .app bundles), so I think it'd be accurate to say that it doesn't reflect the project's current (or even past-decade) views.

Things improved a lot as homebrew relearned the design constraints and reasons why MacPorts made the decisions they did, and wound up adopting many of the same solutions.

It was frustrating in the beginning to see so much marketing-driven shade being thrown from an ill-informed position.

Obviously that wasn’t you or the current maintainers of homebrew, and things have improved tremendously, but that’s the era from which frustration like the grandparent post originates.

> Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

The worst part is that MacPorts already did the same thing, but used hardlinks to avoid the kinds of problems that emerge when (for example) `realpath` resolves a symlink to an unexpected versioned directory that’s supposed to be an implementation detail.

There was a lot of FUD, dishonesty, and shallow understanding from the homebrew creators in the beginning.

> Just go read the original announcements of homebrew.

I can't find these anywhere on the official blog, which goes back to the first 1.0 release of Homebrew. Links would be helpful.

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