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When I started using a Mac in 2009, MacPorts, Fink (and I think there was another I can't recall the name) simply wouldn't work for me. They would take very long to build what I wanted, there weren't nearly as many packages as was in Debian/Ubuntu, and many were old versions. Worse, many build attempts would just fail.

In that scenario, brew worked like a charm. It was quick, had most or even more packages than Debian/Ubuntu and they were newer. Failure to install was rare.

Then, Apple started yearly release of OS X, and that both broke brew and my system hard, so I started investigating and found out about the many "shortcuts" that brew took and how it violated systems components. I was dismayed, and abandoned brew for good.

So, I stood a period where I would use many of my tools inside a Ubuntu VM, until probably 2013-2014, when for some reason I tried again MacPorts, and I don't know why, but that time it was much more reliable, and because of Apple's insane atm SSDs with 2 GB/s bandwidth, install became quick enough. Packages were still somewhat lagging behind in available versions, but the variety of them kinda reached the levels of what was in Debian/Ubuntu, so it was good enough for me.

Then, the killer feature, I found out about macports variants and selectors, which I find the most awesome thing to this date in package managers (I haven't tried nix, still, it might be magnitude better in that regard). No needing to use rvm, pyenv, custom installs of gcc messing with make/autotools, and the only sane way of compiling various Haskell projects (before haskell-stack).

discuss

CaliforniaKarl|1 year ago

I don't know when they introduced it, but I believe MacPorts will build the common variants of the more-used packages. So, if you install a package with the default variants, you'll get a binary download instead of building from source.

But indeed; fast SSDs, parallel compilation, and modern CPUs really help!

saagarjha|1 year ago

I think MacPorts builds basically everything and offers it as a binary if they think they can distribute it legally