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I described the origin of the current situation. Considering you are not a consumer of MacPorts there is no point of reference for you, so you would not know ho

• yunohn 4y ago
  Absolutely, I don’t claim to understand the technical aspects as a non-user. I was making an observation based on the fact that PowerPC Macs were discontinued in 2006 and homebrew was created in 2016. So Macports (or other) could’ve changed things in the last 16yrs, which have been quite transformational for computers and software.
  • oneplane 4y ago
    While some issues have been solved, a lot of them simply migrated from the core ports system to the ports themselves. The difference in goals and tooling between the dpkg (Fink for macOS), ports (MacPorts for macOS) and brew systems seems to make all the remaining volunteers flow towards brew as the work required to fix ports is either harder, or getting the fix into MacPorts is harder. And sine Fink is dead, there is no dpkg-way to try out anymore. I think RPM was never tried, and Nix is still an option but since you'll end up learning functional programming to use it, it won't get the hold the Nix-enjoyers seem to enjoy. Maybe Guix can inspire something, but I think the bar to entry with brew is really hard to beat. The end result is broken and/or outdated ports, and even with the fixes post-macOS Forge the lack of content and port-fixes just makes it a non-starter when things like brew exist.