Seems to me that most of us who have used MacPorts have moved to Homebrew or that could just be the bubble I'm living in. Is there anyone still who still uses MacPorts who could chime in and say why they never made the switch?
I am not a Mac user, but a designer using MacBook joined our team last week, and we struggled for half a day with Homebrew. The next day, we installed MacPorts instead, and with just:
$ sudo port install python27 py27-virtualenv gcc46
we were able to proceed and get the whole stack up and running. Not to mention everything from MacPorts is installed nicely under /opt/local.
MacPorts is just way ahead of Homebrew. OTOH, Portage is way ahead of MacPorts ;)
I had to fight for days to get MacPorts to install anything properly. It gives me flashbacks to the horrors from 3-4 years ago of compiling open source software on Linux.
Homebrew has been fuzzy kittens in comparison.
$ brew search gcc
apple-gcc42 gcc
homebrew/versions/gcc45 homebrew/versions/llvm-gcc28
I'm a bit confused since I thought that these are gcc. Can someone tell me what those results mean? :S
$ brew tap homebrew/dupes
$ brew install gcc --enable-all-languages
Maybe. Maybe not. But I don't think that's the reason homebrew doesn't have gcc. The OP is pointing out homebrew isn't extensive, and misses some commonly used utilities.
brew install rbenv ruby-build; /* rc file shenanigans */; rbenv install 1.9.3-p327; rbenv global 1.9.3-p327; ruby --version
I ran a fairly convincing "Linux-like" alternative desktop using Awesome in XQuartz for about a year before I switched to Linux full time. That was before Homebrew but I'm quite certain that it would have been impossible with it.
MacPorts seems better to me, after years of fink in the past. I need to build for universal (386/x86_64) for testing purposes, so it fits well for me.
I actually rebuild stuff later myself, since I can't really package stuff and require people to have that in /opt/local/bin or anywhere else, but a local folder to the main app.
(I use the same way cygwin on windows, like macports - I love the tools, the stuff, I test a lot of things, but afterall for things I want to distribute I compile myself, and post binaries).