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I see way more people advocating. Homebrew now than a few years ago. I chose MacPorts back then since it seemed a bit better designed as a package manager but

by jarym 5y ago

I see way more people advocating. Homebrew now than a few years ago. I chose MacPorts back then since it seemed a bit better designed as a package manager but these days I see few people suggesting it. What’s the current consensus - is homebrew now good enough to consider switching?

hughrr 5y ago
I don’t use either. I mostly use my mac as an AWS and linode terminal. I think the only things I install locally are VScode and Go and both of those arrive as dmg/pkg format.
akvadrako 5y ago
Homebrew has been good enough since the beginning, hence why it took over from Macports. But it hasn't changed any of it's major design decisions, so if you didn't like it then you wouldn't like it now.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  It puts everything in /opt/homebrew/ now, which I believe was an issue for some people before.
  - pxc 5y ago
    That's good to hear! When did this change happen?
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Dunno, relatively recently as I set up a new Mac a few weeks ago, and it was like that then.
      - Toutouxc 5y ago
        AFAIK the new prefix is only used on M1 Macs, x86 Homebrew uses the old one.
deergomoo 5y ago
I’ve found MacPorts to be better at running multiple versions of packages simultaneously, for example at my last job I needed to have 3 or 4 different versions of PHP running at the same time and it was a bit of a pain to do that with Homebrew compared to MacPorts. Homebrew will often give you a more user-friendly config out of the box, whereas MacPorts will often leave you to configure things yourself. When installing binaries I’ve found MacPorts to be much faster, however it needs to build from source much more often than Homebrew (especially on ARM) which takes far longer.
pxc 5y ago
Homebrew is two package management systems with one command line interface. One is MacPorts but worse and with more contributors (formulae, i.e., the main part of Homebrew). The other (casks) is like Chocolatey on Windows, and downloads the installers or bundle images for GUI apps from their official websites, and then does its best to install them non-interactively for you on an ad-hoc basis. Casks are worth using because they fill a gap that 'proper' package managers mostly don't. Installing GUI apps automatically in this way isn't really package management, but it's still better than installing them manually. Homebrew's main functionality, on the other hand, still has all of the same problems it always has. It also has the advantage that it's more likely to include trendy, new utilities than MacPorts is because it has more contributors. I recommend installing Homebrew to a local prefix under your user (e.g., ~/.opt/homebrew) and using it exclusively for 'casks', but continuing to use MacPorts. If you need something that's not packaged in MacPorts yet, consider Nix instead of Homebrew. The package collection, Nixpkgs, is massive and even more up-to-date than Homebrew, and nothing installed from it will break anything from MacPorts (or be affected by anything MacPorts, either). MacPorts is more likely to include Mac-specific software, but if you're curious about alternatives in general, Pkgsrc is also a sound choice, and you can probably try it alongside MacPorts without breaking anything.

by jarym 5y ago

hughrr 5y ago

I don’t use either. I mostly use my mac as an AWS and linode terminal. I think the only things I install locally are VScode and Go and both of those arrive as dmg/pkg format.

akvadrako 5y ago

Homebrew has been good enough since the beginning, hence why it took over from Macports. But it hasn't changed any of it's major design decisions, so if you didn't like it then you wouldn't like it now.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
It puts everything in /opt/homebrew/ now, which I believe was an issue for some people before.
- pxc 5y ago
  That's good to hear! When did this change happen?
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    Dunno, relatively recently as I set up a new Mac a few weeks ago, and it was like that then.
    - Toutouxc 5y ago
      AFAIK the new prefix is only used on M1 Macs, x86 Homebrew uses the old one.

deergomoo 5y ago

I’ve found MacPorts to be better at running multiple versions of packages simultaneously, for example at my last job I needed to have 3 or 4 different versions of PHP running at the same time and it was a bit of a pain to do that with Homebrew compared to MacPorts. Homebrew will often give you a more user-friendly config out of the box, whereas MacPorts will often leave you to configure things yourself. When installing binaries I’ve found MacPorts to be much faster, however it needs to build from source much more often than Homebrew (especially on ARM) which takes far longer.

pxc 5y ago

Homebrew is two package management systems with one command line interface. One is MacPorts but worse and with more contributors (formulae, i.e., the main part of Homebrew). The other (casks) is like Chocolatey on Windows, and downloads the installers or bundle images for GUI apps from their official websites, and then does its best to install them non-interactively for you on an ad-hoc basis. Casks are worth using because they fill a gap that 'proper' package managers mostly don't. Installing GUI apps automatically in this way isn't really package management, but it's still better than installing them manually. Homebrew's main functionality, on the other hand, still has all of the same problems it always has. It also has the advantage that it's more likely to include trendy, new utilities than MacPorts is because it has more contributors. I recommend installing Homebrew to a local prefix under your user (e.g., ~/.opt/homebrew) and using it exclusively for 'casks', but continuing to use MacPorts. If you need something that's not packaged in MacPorts yet, consider Nix instead of Homebrew. The package collection, Nixpkgs, is massive and even more up-to-date than Homebrew, and nothing installed from it will break anything from MacPorts (or be affected by anything MacPorts, either). MacPorts is more likely to include Mac-specific software, but if you're curious about alternatives in general, Pkgsrc is also a sound choice, and you can probably try it alongside MacPorts without breaking anything.