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I switched to Homebrew a long time ago, when MacPorts had a large advantage in number of packages, freshness, stability etc. For me, MacPorts' main mistake was
by Camillo 12y ago
I switched to Homebrew a long time ago, when MacPorts had a large advantage in number of packages, freshness, stability etc.
For me, MacPorts' main mistake was to go all in with the "storage is cheap, CPU is cheap" canard just as everyone was abandoning desktops for laptops. MacPorts decided to build its own copy of almost everything that the OS distribution provides, to avoid having to deal with version differences between OS X releases. That might have been a decent tradeoff on a Mac Pro, but when you have a laptop with a small HD (and, later, an even smaller SSD), it is a real issue to have to permanently waste several GB on duplicate copies of Perl, Python etc. just because you want to build the GIMP; to say nothing of the hours it would take to build them.
Homebrew's big selling point, for me, was that it could just use the libraries that already came with OS X.
- riffraff 12y ago> to say nothing of the hours it would take to build them. FWIW, nowadays (for a few years?) macports has binary packages, so that is not as big an issue as it used to be, i.e. installing ImageMagick would take hours, now it just usually gets all of the packages and dependencies as binaries. I think used space is not a huge problem either (I have 130 packages and it uses 1GB), the real issue is that it's anti-intuitive that macports does not remove inactive stuff and does not autoclean, so you end up with a lot of wasted space for stuff you had no interest in keeping.