What is the difference usage of homebrew macports or other package installation tools

Question

I ve just recently switched to a Mac from Ubuntu  I was disappointed that mac doesn t have the convenient sudo apt-get in Ubuntu  I ve heard that I should use homebrew but I m not exactly sure what homebrew or macports does

User · Answer

Currently  Macports has many more packages   18 6 K  than there are Homebrew formulae   3 1K   owing to its maturity  Homebrew is slowly catching up though   Macport packages tend to be maintained by a single person   Macports can keep multiple versions of packages around  and you can enable or disable them to test things out  Sometimes this list can get corrupted and you have to manually edit it to get things back in order  although this is not too hard   Both package managers will ask to be regularly updated  This can take some time   Note  you can have both package managers on your system  It is not one or the other  Brew might complain but Macports won t   Also  if you are dealing with python or ruby packages  use a virtual environment wherever possible

User · Answer

Homebrew and macports both solve the same problem - that is the installation of common libraries and utilities that are not bundled with osx   Typically these are development related libraries and the most common use of these tools is for developers working on osx   They both need the xcode command line tools installed  which you can download separately from https   developer apple com    and for some specific packages you will need the entire xcode IDE installed   xcode can be installed from the mac app store  its a free download but it takes a while since its around 5GB  if I remember correctly    macports is an osx version of the port utility from BSD  as osx is derived from BSD  this was a natural choice   For anyone familiar with any of the BSD distributions  macports will feel right at home   One major difference between homebrew and macports  and the reason I prefer homebrew is that it will not overwrite things that should be installed  natively  in osx  This means that if there is a native package available  homebrew will notify you instead of overwriting it and causing problems further down the line  It also installs libraries in the user space  thus  you don t need to use  sudo  to install things   This helps when getting rid of libraries as well since everything is in a path accessible to you   homebrew also enjoys a more active user community and its packages  called formulas  are updated quite often        macports does not overwrite native OSX packages - it supplies its own   version - This is the main reason I prefer macports over home-brew  you   need to be certain of what you are using and Apple s change at   different times to the ports and have been know to be years behind   updates in some projects      Can you give a reference showing that macports overwrites native OS X   packages  As far as I can tell  all macports installation happens in    opt local   Perhaps I should clarify - I did not say anywhere in my answer that macports overwrites OSX native packages  They both install items separately   Homebrew will warn you when you should install things  natively   using the library tool s preferred installer  for better compatibility  This is what I meant   It will also use as many of the local libraries that are available in OS X  From the wiki      We really don   t like dupes in Homebrew homebrew      However  we do like dupes in the tap       Stuff that comes with OS X or is a library that is provided by   RubyGems  CPAN or PyPi should not be duped  There are good reasons for   this          Duplicate libraries regularly break builds   Subtle bugs emerge with duplicate libraries  and to a lesser extent  duplicate tools   We want you to try harder to make your formula work with what OS X comes with      You can optionally overwrite the macosx supplied versions of utilities with homebrew

User · Answer

By default  Homebrew installs packages to your  usr local  Macport commands require sudo to install and upgrade  similar to apt-get in Ubuntu     For more detail    This site suggests using Hombrew  http   deephill com macports-vs-homebrew   whereas this site lists the advantages of using Macports  http   arstechnica com civis viewtopic php f 19 amp t 1207907  I also switched from Ubuntu recently  and I enjoy using homebrew  it s simple and easy to use    but if you feel attached to using sudo  Macports might be the better way to go

User · Answer

MacPorts is the way to go    Like  user475443 pointed  MacPorts has many many more packages  With brew you ll find yourself trapped soon because the formula you need doesn t exist  MacPorts is a native application  C   TCL  You don t need Ruby at all  To install Ruby on Mac OS X you might need MacPorts  so just go with MacPorts and you ll be happy  MacPorts is really stable  in 8 years I never had a problem with it  and my entire Unix ecosystem relay on it  If you are a PHP developer you can install the last version of Apache  Mac OS X uses 2 2   PHP and all the extensions you need  then upgrade all with one command  Forget to do the same with Homebrew  MacPorts support groups   foo macpro    port select --summary  Name        Selected      Options                                   db          none          db46 none gcc         none          gcc42 llvm-gcc42 mp-gcc48 none llvm        none          mp-llvm-3 3 none mysql       mysql56       mysql56 none php         php55         php55 php56 none postgresql  postgresql94  postgresql93 postgresql94 none python      none          python24 python25-apple python26-apple python27 python27-apple none   If you have both PHP55 and PHP56 installed  with many different extensions   you can swap between them with just one command  All the relative extensions are part of the group and they will be activated within the chosen group  php55 or php56  I m not sure Homebrew has this feature  Rubists like to rewrite everything in Ruby  because the only thing they are at ease is Ruby itself

[homebrew] What is the difference/usage of homebrew, macports or other package installation tools?

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