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Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew

mxcl.github.com

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Re: Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew

#3

Post by jnoller »

I can't recommend homebrew enough - I've been burned by macports and fink in the past, and so I had reverted to the time tested "just compile stuff by hand". Homebrew strikes a good balance between the raw, do it yourself approach and something as big and intermingled as macports.

Re: Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew

#8

Post by amock »

jnoller wrote: post #3

I can't recommend homebrew enough - I've been burned by macports and fink in the past, and so I had reverted to the time tested "just compile stuff by hand". Homebrew strikes a good balance between the raw, do it yourself approach and something as big and intermingled as macports.

What problems did you have with MacPorts?

Re: Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew

#9

Post by tvon »

bshep wrote: post #5

I currently use MacPorts... just wondering why I should switch?

FWIW, I was an early Homebrew user and even contributed a few recipes, but I moved back to MacPorts because (and no offense to mxcl, but it's kind of unavoidable) the author seems to do things with little understanding of the underlying system or justification.

Taking ownership of /user/local is completely utterly pointless and just plain bad advice. Copy-and-pasting optimization code from the Gentoo wiki is pointless. Binaries and libs are stripped without must justification, which will (did for me anyway) cause problems when compoing against the libs (eg, easy_install-ing anything against homebrew libs caused problems for me).

There has also been a lot of FUD spread about at the expense of MacPorts which I think is just low class. The anti-Macports complaints basically amount to "I don't understand this, so I'm going to say it's bad".

That said, it's written in ruby, uses github and the homepage is well done, so it will probably be wildly popular.

Re: Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew

#10

Post by 100k »

bshep wrote: post #5

I currently use MacPorts... just wondering why I should switch?

I haven't switched to Homebrew but the advantage is that MacPorts creates its own universe of libraries, whereas Homebrew uses what Mac OS X already comes with. This makes installs a lot faster.
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