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The other downside to MacPorts' original way of building everything is that sometimes, for whatever reason, things just wouldn't build and getting help with tha

The other downside to MacPorts' original way of building everything is that sometimes, for whatever reason, things just wouldn't build and getting help with that was thorny, particularly for those who'd just started dabbling in software development or CLI usage. Where a vet or moderately seasoned user might find the thrown error actionable, the new user would google the error, find a couple of semi-related but ultimately unhelpful archived mailing list threads from n years ago, and probably give up and find some other way to get the package they need.

todd8 6y ago
Just today my new config for Emacs refused to build libgit. I could see the CMake error, but rather than figuring out how to fix it I just commented out that part of my config (resulting in slightly more overhead in magic). Even with many years of serious software development, I really don't like debugging build problems. I used to use Fink and MacPorts for MacOS package management, but brew was so easy to use that it won me over.