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MacPorts started as a build-from-source package manager. The introduction of prebuilt binary packages is a recent addition. It was added only because some packa

• ssalazar 10y ago
  > Fink is full of old packages, but MacPorts ports are pretty up to date. There are still lots of devs maintaining MacPorts these days. So I don't know what dire status you were talking about. At the time Homebrew rose in popularity it was super easy to add packages to and update existing packages. MacPorts had a reputation, at least, for being inflexible and difficult for casual maintainers. Some not-completely-esoteric packages would not be updated from upstream sources for years. In my case there was (still is?) the particularly strange case of GNU Octave, in which the development version (octave-devel) had completely superceded the regular package (octave), and this was not really well documented. To get anything done at all with Octave you had to use octave-devel, while octave was essentially a vestigial limb floating around for no reason.