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I switched from MP to Homebrew over a decade ago. At the time, Homebrew was less finicky and better at resolving dependency conflicts. It was a lot easier to g

I switched from MP to Homebrew over a decade ago. At the time, Homebrew was less finicky and better at resolving dependency conflicts. It was a lot easier to get a system running MacPorts into a an irretrievably borked state. Not long after, Homebrew install instructions became ubiquitous, whereas with MacPorts it seemed like you always had to figure it out for yourself — if the package was even available, which it more often wasn’t. Haven’t used MacPorts since. Has it gotten any better at those things?

teh64 13d ago
I switched from brew to macports, and I have not experienced the first problem at all. In fact, I had more problems with brew, where some package needed to be updated that I did not want, and I caused a cascade of issues. The second has also never happened to me. macports installs the packages into a separate prefix, and you just add that to the path, so I wonder how it could bork irretrievably. Regarding instructions: for most packages, I found that just replacing `brew` with `sudo port` is enough, as most ports are available. And quite a few install instructions mention homebrew together with macports. I have not run into missing packages, but sometimes the ones that existed were a little out of date.