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MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

trac.macports.org

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Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#12

Post by kylewpppd »

philfreo wrote: post #9
nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

I'd go for sheer package numbers, and also MacPorts traditionally has had much better support for Python packages, and the rudimentary python_select.

Macports says they have 8199 packages. Brew has 1626 by my unscientific count (hint: $('table.tree-browser tr').length ).

A major difference is in how packages are installed. Brew by default will use native OS X packages. Macports installs all dependencies to /opt/local. So a trivial install for Brew could lead to a long install in Macports. I've had Macports build GCC.

But this new version is supposed to allow for pre-compiled binaries. So maybe a lot of that beef will disappear?

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#13

Post by stock_toaster »

philfreo wrote: post #9
nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

I made the switch to homebrew fairly recently (within the last two months).

Things I like:

* I install everything to ~/.brew/ and it works great. I did _not_ like their documented recommendation to install everything to /usr/local and chown it as your user. I have yet to run into any issues installing to my home dir.

* Installs of things have fewer deps, or at least perceived, compared to macports. Nice to not have a separate copy of everything. I haven't run into issues (yet!) where an OS update makes something puke, so this could be a problem down the road, but so far so good.

* Upgrades are very simple: brew update / brew upgrade

* Toolset is easy to work with.

* timely updates

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#14

Post by phr »

dotBen wrote: post #3

I've been a happy homebrew user since it launched - anyone care to comment on the benefits/improvements of MacPorts V2 over homebrew?

Last time I looked, MacPorts had a more paranoid approach to dependencies. That can be good and bad. Homebrew can be easier to use, until you run into a corner case that trips it up. MacPorts can be frustrating in how many dependencies it will insist on installing its own version even though the system-provided version might have worked.

I've gone back and forth. For a while homebrew could install a working GHC for me while I wasn't having any luck with MacPorts. Later something else caused me to switch back to MacPorts. Neither is perfect. Even MacPorts only allows dependencies at the package level, without regard to variants, or versions, if I recall correctly.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#15

Post by llimllib »

philfreo wrote: post #9
nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

1) Brew doesn't hide my stuff in /opt/macports/opt/package/ports/port/python/etc/etc/etc

2) Brew packages are simple to make and inspect. Many people make and inspect them. Bug fixes happen quickly.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#16

Post by kkowalczyk »

philfreo wrote: post #9
nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

Maybe things have changed but I switched from MacPorts to homebrew in the early days of homebrew (2009?) because it was way easier to install.

MacPort's package installer tools mystified me. Homebrew could be improved too, but is better.

Finally, homebrew seems more open to contributions and because they use GitHub, it's very easy to contribute new packages and the high level of activity on Homebrew reflects that. I briefly looked at what it would take to contribute to MacPorts and it was harder.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#17

Post by acangiano »

philfreo wrote: post #9
nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

Brew doesn't install the whole universe and take hours to install a small utility. MacPorts does.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#19

Post by sjs »

dotBen wrote: post #3

I've been a happy homebrew user since it launched - anyone care to comment on the benefits/improvements of MacPorts V2 over homebrew?

For those of us who haven't hit homebrew's edge cases in years of use are probably fine to keep using homebrew. If it ain't broke...

I just want it to install packages. It does that so I'm happy.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#20

Post by kaffeinecoma »

nathos wrote: post #8

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Giving this a try now. While I'm waiting for XCode to download, can anyone comment on the best way to get Apache httpd running on OSX? Is there a Homebrew package for this?

I use Apache to front Tomcat on a linux server, but it would be really handy to be able to test stuff locally on my Mac before copying changes up to the server.

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