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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

#51

Post by doty »

Locke1689 wrote: post #46
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…

Just a side note but /usr does not actually stand for /user (although I often pronounce it that way when speaking). It's actually an initialism standing for UNIX System Resources.

You sure that isn't just a backronym? It seems highly unlikely given its peers (/etc, /lib, /bin, none of which are acronyms) and given the system it lives in, which I don't think used the word "resources" anywhere else.

When I google I mainly find drive-by assertions that it means "UNIX System Resources" (and sometimes "User Specific Resources"). The closest I can find to something real is:

http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/usr.html

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

#52

Post by lutorm »

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 fink?

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

#54

Post by jvdh »

troystribling wrote: post #45
bshep wrote: post #5

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

I gave up MacPorts after several install failures, notably gtk after about a 1 hour compile, and switched to development in an Ubuntu VM. Have not had a problem since.

gtk failure is a problem with Snow Leopard, there's no stable gtk version that iscompatible with SL.

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

#55

Post by mark_l_watson »

oomkiller wrote: post #32
freetard wrote: post #20

A better way to use all those unix tools is to just run Ubuntu in a VM and develop there, or just replace MacOS with Ubuntu entirely.

Did ubuntu suddenly get TextMate support? Also, have they fixed the poor graphics acceleration issues? Didn't think so, go away troll.

I hear you: TextMate is a great editor, especially when you want to browse through a lot of code. That said, "e" on Windows is fairly TextMate compatible (at least it runs the TextMate plugins). For Ubuntu, GEdit and Emacs are very good. Emacs with Speedbar lets you whip through lots of code quickly. GEdit also provides good plugins and multiple directory code browsing.

All that said, I still boot OS X for specific apps (TexShop, OmniGraffle mostly). Anyway, it is a free world, and certainly OS X is a great choice for development.

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

#56

Post by mark_l_watson »

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.

For years, I have "compiled stuff by hand" of OS X - not a bad approach, but it takes time. If I was just a software developer I would probably run OS X most of the time because I would have my tools built and installed once and no repeat time wasting work. For me, I also write on tech a lot, and sometimes I get some consulting work fitting people's projects to technology stacks. As a result, I have the perfect excuse to try just about everything and installing "everything" is simpler on Linux.

If Homebrew develops into a great system in the future, I might boot less to Ubuntu.

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

#57

Post by miles »

Locke1689 wrote: post #46
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…

Just a side note but /usr does not actually stand for /user (although I often pronounce it that way when speaking). It's actually an initialism standing for UNIX System Resources.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Unix_directory_structure

/usr -- originally the directory holding user home directories, its use has changed, and it now holds executables, libraries, and shared resources that are not system critical: X11, KDE, PERL, etc. (The name "Unix System Resources" is a post hoc backronym.)

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

#58

Post by shabble »

compay wrote: post #42
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 have everything installed in ~/Homebrew and have had no problems. I really wanted to keep liking Macports, but I got sick of having to install a new perl just to install git, among many examples. The kicker for me was installing pandoc; Macports wanted to download and compile a new GHC, refusing to recognize the one on my system. I let it run for 3 hours and finally killed the install and looked for a better way to…

Perl and GHC are the two packages I've had the most problems with as well. Some other languages seem to have a foo_select package which will allow you to switch the primary version, but 'perl5' seems fixed at 5.8.something, which is pretty horrible.

There's a ticket with a lot of activity at http://trac.macports.org/ticket/16830 but afaik there's still no easy way to stop it trying to rip out your new perl 5.10 without manually fixing deps everywhere.

GHC I just installed from a binary package :-)

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

#59

Post by evgen »

apinstein wrote: post #44
zephjc wrote: post #36

this is #1 what drives me nuts about macports: $ port deps clojure-contrib Full Name: clojure-contrib @1.1.0 Build Dependencies: clojure Fetch Dependencies: git-core $ port deps git-core Full Name: git-core @1.7.0.2+doc Runtime Dependencies: rsync, perl5, p5-error Library Dependencies: curl, zlib, openssl, expat, libiconv with no possibility of skipping dependencies

Why don't you just edit the port to add a variant that lets you opt-out of those dependencies? Poor package management isn't the fault of MacPorts; a Homebrew port could be just as poorly designed. The "variants" infrastructure of MacPorts is one of my favorite parts of MacPorts, it definitely makes it easier to manage interdependencies IMHO.

Truth. Anyone capable of maintaining a homebrew setup has Sufficient skills to spend five minutes scanning the macports guide and tweaking the port files. OTOH, building clojure is te leas of the parents problems; he is in for anworld of painful surprise when he sees how screwed up packaging is. Have a clojure app? Include your own copy of clojure and clojure-contrib. Have a clojure editing mode? Do the same. Have a blog entry that mentions clojure? I think you need to download and squirrel away the jar files in those cases as well...

I ended up creating my own branch of the port tree for clojure bits just because of all the patching needed to avoid this "let me grab a copy of clojure for you" behavior.

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

#60

Post by troystribling »

jvdh wrote: post #54
troystribling wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up MacPorts after several install failures, notably gtk after about a 1 hour compile, and switched to development in an Ubuntu VM. Have not had a problem since.

gtk failure is a problem with Snow Leopard, there's no stable gtk version that iscompatible with SL.

I had build errors with 10.5.
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