MacPorts vs Homebrew

MacPorts is a better alternative to Homebrew, I never had any problems with it.

I like Macports a lot more. I've never had an issue with any of the packages really besides a few esoteric ones that failed to build or hadn't been updated in a while (and they are usually easy to by updating the portfile). I prefer the segregated environment of macports too, you won't overwrite any system stuff. I got the impression that homebrew wasn't a terribly well thought out tool and was a bit lazy. There's a lot of 'github' culture there which I'm

MacPorts is based on apt. You might enjoy using that more than brew.

Homebrew isn't great but having to manually remove and reinstall all macports every os upgrade, having to deal with messed up dependencies and debugging failed compiling errors manually, and having macports libraries conflict with other mac software and making it crash was just too much. I need at best a few tools provided by these package managers and I don't want to spend hours messing around with their configurations. I just want them to work. Brew used to have issues for me but the

I'd recommend checking out some other package managers for Mac. I'm being a bit harsh on Homebrew, but Macports is generally a better option IMO. The real crown-jewel is truly what everyone says; Nix. It's just a brilliant, next-generation package management tool that does what it says on the tin. It works on MacOS, allows for granular package installation/upgrading, ephemeral shell-based dev environments, declarative system management and more.It's a bit like

I used to use MacPorts, and switched to Homebrew. For exactly one reason: Homebrew uses, whenever possible, the tools already built in to macOS, where as MacPorts builds new versions of those tools in order to maintain a pristine build environment.MacPorts' philosophy seems better in theory, but in practice it has two flaws that turned out to be very significant for me. The first is that you end up needing a huge number of ports, partly because you're duplicating the tools already o

I'd plump for Macports or pkgsrc long before Homebrew.

MacPorts has binary packages. Homebrew uses Ruby not bash. MacPorts uses Tcl. MacPorts just has better QA.

Homebrew is a much more reliable package manager than macports. Trying to make OSX into Linux might have been the problem there, it’s just a little different in many aspects. What kind of tools did you miss?

back in the day macports was a fucking nightmare. homebrew may not be perfect but it is popular for good reason.