Alternatives to HomeBrew

[ain]

Feature request: I think riddance from Brew would be a good move, many (old-fashioned) devs still don't believe in extending on top of the OS X utils and are using MacPorts instead. For reliability reasons.

[oliverguenther]

I don't understand how MacPorts would be more reliable than HomeBrew. The latter will, if available, exploit the locally installed versions with OS X (avoiding a tremendous amount of computation and storage complexity), while MacPorts never relies on the system and is prone to install / override local versions.
With HomeBrew, this will never happen unless you force it to (e.g., installing from homebrew-dupes to get newer versions).

I can't think of a single good reason why one would prefer MacPorts when the same package is available on brew.

[ain]

@oliverguenther, as you just put it yourself, those are the exact grounds of one or the other preference. For me I've seen the packages break for myself and for the team, thus the personal preference. Pretty much along the lines of this article.

Maybe Decouple was a bad word to use, I'm sorry for that.

[oliverguenther]

Thanks for the clarification. Please do not view my comments as an offense to your choice, but rather an opinion from a long-time brew user. :)

I disagree with most if not all points of the article, but I know that brew tends to break more often for older versions of OS X. I can reckon that this would cause harm in a larger group of devs with older systems.

That being said, I'm not the developer of this project and I guess no one would object a portfile for this project for MacPorts.

Am 2. Juni 2015 15:56:15 MESZ, schrieb Ain Tohvri notifications@github.com:

@oliverguenther, as you just put it yourself, those are the exact
grounds of one or the other preference. For me I've seen the packages
break for myself and for the team, thus the personal preference. Pretty
much along the lines of this
article.

Maybe Decouple was a bad word to use, I'm sorry for that.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#32 (comment)

Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Mobiltelefon mit Kaiten Mail gesendet.

[brikis98]

I've had much more success and less pain with HomeBrew than MacPorts. I was even looking into replacing the bash script installer with a HomeBrew recipe, as mentioned in #4. I'd be OK supporting both HomeBrew and MacPorts if the following conditions are met:

1. Duplication is kept to a minimum. I don't want to have to maintain two separate installers with two separate lists of dependencies.
2. We find a way to add automated testing for the installer. I think the only test that would make sense in this case is an end-to-end integration test (install Boot2Docker and docker-osx-dev on a clean machine, run it, and make sure files are syncing), but as explained in Can't run integration tests in CircleCI #7, I can't find any CI environment that will allow me to run such a test. Therefore, I'm currently testing the script locally, which is easy since its idempotent, but obviously manual testing doesn't scale very well, and it only gets harder with multiple install paths.

I've marked this issue as an "enhancement" and as "blocked" until #7 can be resolved. I'd love some help in that area.

[brandontamm]

guys - i think it's a matter of preference between macports users and homebrew users. none will switch just for one piece of software, and I don't think you'd want to limit your user base ;)

I am waiting to see if you guys do a home-brew. one thing i like about home-brew is i feel like if things go south with dependencies, I can always uninstall them and even homebrew to get my system back. I will never install anything without a package manager because I've had to blow away tooooo many systems trying to get my dev dependencies perfect.

+1 for Homebrew

[ain]

@tabr0201 the current ticket was foremost about dependency installation rather than packaging. But good call, yes.