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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

#31

Post by jacknagel »

singular wrote: post #28
acangiano wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does brew compile from source? That is one of the most frustrating aspects of macports, for example I was trying to install a simple musical ear training tool the other day and it went to compile GCC. Argh!

Yes, in most cases, but most packages have minimal dependencies due to Homebrew's "use what OS X provides" philosophy, i.e., the XCode toolchain (Homebrew doesn't even have a package for GCC).

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#32

Post by ubernostrum »

singular wrote: post #28
acangiano wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does brew compile from source? That is one of the most frustrating aspects of macports, for example I was trying to install a simple musical ear training tool the other day and it went to compile GCC. Argh!

The thing with MacPorts is, basically, you're installing a parallel universe that doesn't know about the software your system already had. So it has to bootstrap completely from scratch, including its own toolchain, basic libraries, etc.

Once you get all that, it goes faster, but the first time you go to install something simple you're basically going to walk away for a couple hours while it sets up its own little world.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#33

Post by alimbada »

New Mac user here (~5+ weeks). Just echoing what others have said about Homebrew here so far:

After some research, MacPorts looked painful to install/maintain so I went with Homebrew seeing as it looked like there was more activity going on there as well as being easy to contribute to via github and what looked like a short tutorial on creating and contributing your own packages (+ a bit of ruby knowledge) if I felt the need.

I like it simple. :)

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#34

Post by sudonim »

Congrats to the MacPorts team for 2.0 and lion support. It's unusual in a HN thread that most of the talk is about an alternative to the posted topic. However, I have to tip my hat to the work the MP team but it would be irresponsible to recommend it over Homebrew. Homebrew is what a package manager should feel like.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#35

Post by mrcharles »

nathos wrote: post #8

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

I am intrigued by the overwhelming support for Homebrew here -- is there a web resource for package lists so I can see if it will work for me? I haven't been able to google one up.

I don't use macports a lot, I think the biggest things I have installed are Python 2.7, PIL, and Hg.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#36

Post by brown9-2 »

alimbada wrote: post #33

New Mac user here (~5+ weeks). Just echoing what others have said about Homebrew here so far: After some research, MacPorts looked painful to install/maintain so I went with Homebrew seeing as it looked like there was more activity going on there as well as being easy to contribute to via github and what looked like a short tutorial on creating and contributing your own packages (+ a bit of ruby knowledge) if I felt…

As a point of contrast - I've been using OS X for about 8 weeks and I had some problems when first installing Homebrew (I do not remember the specifics, but I seem to recall some issues with installing iPython and the modules I wanted to use) - and since giving MacPorts a try I've really had no issues with it.

My only advice on MacPorts is to always do a dry-run before installing packages (port -y install), to see what dependencies will be dragged in - installing num.py wanted to re-compile a numerical computing package from scratch which I had to kill after a few hours of compilation (with no visible progress on the command line).

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#37

Post by daviddavis »

mrcharles wrote: post #35
nathos wrote: post #8

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

I am intrigued by the overwhelming support for Homebrew here -- is there a web resource for package lists so I can see if it will work for me? I haven't been able to google one up. I don't use macports a lot, I think the biggest things I have installed are Python 2.7, PIL, and Hg.

Homebrew is just a Ruby project in git so all the packages (or formulas) are just rb files inside the project:

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula

They usually only provide the most recent stable version of each project but you can find other formulas on the web and just run:

brew install [url]

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#38

Post by kaffeinecoma »

selvakn wrote: post #21
kaffeinecoma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im not sure about Lion, but OSX comes with built in apache server. Goto System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing

Ah, I knew that Web Sharing used Apache, but I didn't realize that it was packaged in such a way as to be usable for stuff beyond Web Sharing. The conf files seem to live in /etc.apache2. Thanks for that.

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#39

Post by saurik »

micampe wrote: post #23
philfreo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The benefit is that Homebrew uses what you already have in the system, without creating its own separate world where it rebuilds everything even if a perfectly working version is already provided.

MacPorts used to do this, and then stopped because the copy on the system sometimes wasn't "a perfectly working version" and by virtue of being tied to an entire OS update caused giant incompatibilities (as you had to deal with, simultaneously, broken old versions and broken new versions existing in the ecosystem).

Re: MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

#40

Post by mikemaccana »

acangiano wrote: post #17
philfreo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Confirming that - my new MacPorts 2 install installed perl and ncurses just to get ipython.

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