91–95 of 95 posts
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This is exactly what I also thought when I read the headline. And this becomes even more strange given that they are almost certainly building upon using MinGW.
I have used MinGW, and MinGW is terribly slow comparing to Gow. Do a simple "ls" you will feel the difference. Not to mention bash.
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I was about to ask the same question. MinGW is already the lightweight alternative to Cygwin, and has largely taken over for the task of compiling unixy things on Windows. The major difference between MinGW and Cygwin is MinGW tries to use native Microsoft libs by dummy wrapping them (like, MS's libc is often compatible with POSIX standard stuff, the POSIX version merely starts with _ frequently, MinGW uses this fact…
The biggest difference to me is: Gow is amazingly FAST! I have used MinGW and it is extremly slow, I need to always remind myself to use dir instead of ls, otherwise it's a few seconds' wait. However, I do not think Gow is able to compile. (I did not really look into the documentation as github is blocked in my office.) Another difference is MinGW appears to provide more up-to-date binary. e.g. bash in MinGW is 3.1 a…
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Macports used to not build this "sandbox", but learned the lesson that relying on Apple as your only source of updates to critical base libraries was fraught with peril: not only do you not get updates you might need ("upgrade to 10.6" is not a reasonable response to someone who just wants to use a project that needs a slightly newer version of libcurl), but sometimes Apple can ship changes that break compatibility w…
The "sandbox" increases the complexity of the system that the user deals with. The other notion of simplicity is one that should matter only to the Macports developers. I do not like to criticise open-source projects, but the (reasonably polite) hostility that stating this simple fact has attracted does make me think that the supporters of Macports have stopped seeing things from the user's point of view. If you want…
(Honestly: what does Homebrew make simpler than MacPorts anyway? Near as I can tell, the only reason people seem to like it is that it doesn't take as long to compile software, which argues more strongly to me that we need binary distributions that can download pre-compiled copies than that we should attempt to use the libraries to save installation time.)
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The "sandbox" increases the complexity of the system that the user deals with. The other notion of simplicity is one that should matter only to the Macports developers. I do not like to criticise open-source projects, but the (reasonably polite) hostility that stating this simple fact has attracted does make me think that the supporters of Macports have stopped seeing things from the user's point of view. If you want…
As a user, I find knowing that "install X from MacPorts" should always work, no matter what underlying version of Mac OS X I have, can always be up to date with the latest features, without having to update Mac OS X, and won't fail when I /do/ want to upgrade Mac OS X, the definition of "simplicity". (Honestly: what does Homebrew make simpler than MacPorts anyway? Near as I can tell, the only reason people seem to li…
1. No alternative copies of Python, Perl, Ruby, zlib, etc...
2. Everything installs to where it is supposed to, i.e., under /usr/local/
After installing via Homebrew, things do not look drastically different to having compiled them by hand.
Fink does install precompiled binaries: http://www.finkproject.org/
If you think there is no complexity issue with sandboxes, try using both Macports and Fink side-by-side.
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As a user, I find knowing that "install X from MacPorts" should always work, no matter what underlying version of Mac OS X I have, can always be up to date with the latest features, without having to update Mac OS X, and won't fail when I /do/ want to upgrade Mac OS X, the definition of "simplicity". (Honestly: what does Homebrew make simpler than MacPorts anyway? Near as I can tell, the only reason people seem to li…
Why I prefer Homebrew: 1. No alternative copies of Python, Perl, Ruby, zlib, etc... 2. Everything installs to where it is supposed to, i.e., under /usr/local/ After installing via Homebrew, things do not look drastically different to having compiled them by hand. Fink does install precompiled binaries: http://www.finkproject.org/ If you think there is no complexity issue with sandboxes, try using both Macports and Fi…
And if I need a newer version of Python, coupled with a dependency tree of third-party modules?
I don't see why this matters, other than some pedantic sense of cleanliness ("NO DUPLICATES!" ... even though they're not, in reality, duplicates).
2. Everything installs to where it is supposed to, i.e., under /usr/local/
You can configure MacPorts to do this, but the reason it's not the default was to leave /usr/local for the user's own manually installed software. I don't think this really matters either way.
After installing via Homebrew, things do not look drastically different to having compiled them by hand.
I don't know what this means or why it matters.