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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

#21

Post by rufo »

tvon wrote: post #9
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 pointles…

I've had MacPorts completely explode in my face several times when installing a seemingly innocuous package - some shared library gets replaced due to a requirement, and suddenly every utility I've installed doesn't work. Eventually I got to a point where I only used MacPorts to install ImageMagick and compiled everything else by hand; so far homebrew has felt like a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself".

I can't say I've had any problems with compiling Ruby gems against homebrew besides some settings that needed to be overridden in the MySQL gem, so that hasn't been a problem for me.

I kind of have mixed feelings about the ownership. So far I've been running it in /usr/local owned by my user and haven't had any problems, but I can see the security argument for not doing it. It doesn't feel any different then compiling your own binaries and leaving them in your home directory, something I've had to do on several hosts I've had in the past. (Also: Snow Leopard doesn't install anything to /usr/local by default, so if you're starting from scratch there's nothing to take ownership of...)

Overall, I've rather liked it so far. We'll see if I regret it...

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

#23

Post by jnoller »

rufo wrote: post #21
tvon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pointles…

I've had MacPorts completely explode in my face several times when installing a seemingly innocuous package - some shared library gets replaced due to a requirement, and suddenly every utility I've installed doesn't work. Eventually I got to a point where I only used MacPorts to install ImageMagick and compiled everything else by hand; so far homebrew has felt like a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself".…

Thank you, the "a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself" line exactly sums up my feelings.

If I really wanted a fleshed out, mature package management system, honestly - I'd install Ubuntu or Fedora.

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

#28

Post by FluidDjango »

bshep wrote: post #5

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

If it worked for you: then you shouldn't.

I had nothing but grief from trying to to get a basic (but up to date) LAMP running on any of several OS X (10.5 - 10.6). Life is too short.

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

#30

Post by oomkiller »

bshep wrote: post #5

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

As a previous MacPorts user, I love homebrew. I keep macports around, because it has tons of ports that homebrew doesn't, but I dread using them because it is so much slower than homebrew. OS X ships with a lot of libs, and XCode installs even more. With macports, it redownloads and recompiles ALL of them, but with Homebrew it uses what you have. Also, the formulas are updated more often than macports, which I guess could be a good or bad thing.
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