HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 INSTALL
HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 PATCH
HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 SOFTWARE

While installing homebrew on a computer where I've been using ports for years, here is what I can read: Warning: You have MacPorts or Fink installed: To address your last question: I don't see any reason why uninstalling MacPorts would cause any problems.

Therefore, and with little personal experience, I theorize that always using the -t flag for MacPort installs should prevent most problems of having MacPorts and Homebrew coexist on the same system. One of the reasons Homebrew just works relative to the competition isīecause we recommend installing to /usr/local. This is relevant because according to the Homebrew Installation Page: This feature is called trace mode and is activated by usr/local (and all other files a port does not depend on) from ports'īuild systems. Note that starting with 2.3.0, MacPorts can automatically hide

I'll just note how much worse packaging is on OSX than FreeBSD: Apple does not really seem to care about the usability of its BSD subsytem, because this is a problem they could help with. And once you realise that problems in /usr/local do not generally carry the risk of permanent damage to your machines, you may feel freer to take risks. If you are willing to document which packages you need with Homebrew, and wipe /usr/local clean and reinstall in case of difficulties, then you can always back out in the case things go badly wrong. Homebrew, in this respect at least, does things the way they used to be done, and MacPorts tries not to interfere. I understand that the motivation is to make life easier for themselves when dealing with cries for help on their mailing list and bug tracker: please be aware, though, that while we should respect the effort of volunteer packagers and treat their time as precious, their debugging convenience is not the only sort of simplicity that affects you, as a user.

HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 INSTALL

I tried configuring MacPorts to install to /usr/local, but MacPorts goes out of its way to make that difficult. Since my experience with MacPorts and Fink has typically been exasperation caused by exactly this, and at some point switching to compiling the old-fashioned way to /usr/local, I was pleased to see that Homebrew didn't mess about with that. But while Autoconf usually does figure out issues, the sheer build complexity of many open-source projects does cause problems and these problems can be hard to back out of when you get into difficulty.īut the risk of trouble with Autoconf finding something it shouldn't under /usr/local needs to be balanced about the maintenance nuisance having two, three, or four different different copies of Perl, Tcl, and Ruby, each with different coverage of their different package libraries. The build tools expect there to be lots of things there: in the good old days before package managers (I joke), we compiled whatever to /usr/local. I used to think that worries about what the Gnu build tools will make of /usr/local were verging on paranoid. Having anything installed in /usr/local will definitely cause problems

HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 PATCH

MacPorts is doing their best to patch out any harcoded In general, it is usually better to stick to one tool only to avoidĪll problems. Unfortunately Homebrew developersĭidn't want to hear about prior experiences and ignored such facts. But it turned out not to cooperate with other toolsĪs is documented in their FAQ. Years ago, in the very beginning of the project, even MacPorts was The wrong dependency, using Homebrew's version instead of their own.

HOMEBREW VS MACPORTS 2017 SOFTWARE

Therefore builds from other packaging software might pick up This is the default, which is a bad choiceĪs this path is in the default search path of compilers and other Homebrew will cause problems when building software from source if it I gave another answer on a similar question:

See macports mail lists and bugs for examples of things found in /usr/local. This means that a macports compile could find something the porter did not expect. The Apple gcc looks in /usr/local for some things.

Homebrew vs macports 2017