[rsync]

"Agreed, I don't understand why so many people use homebrew instead of macports."

This might seem very odd to you, and maybe I'm a weird outlier, but after having used macports for years, and installed it many times on many different systems, the requirement for full blown xcode is quite a turn-off and makes any alternative interesting and attractive.

The OSX system I am typing on now should have macports on it, and I sort of need it, but I just never have time to devote an hour to app store -> dev login -> xcode install -> blah blah -> macports.

[mapgrep]

Just FYI anyone can download XCode from the App Store, it doesn't require a "dev login". (Agree it would be nice if MacPorts only required the XCode Command Line tools like homebrew, it would be one less download.)

[Scarbutt]

I was going to try macports but the XCode download turn me off, why it can rely only on the command line tools?

[neverpanic]

It can, in theory. In practice, there are some ports that actually need a full Xcode installation to build, and those would just fail without Xcode.

In an ideal world, there would be a dependency declared on Xcode for all those ports so MacPorts would work with command line tools only and fail gracefully whenever Xcode is required. However, that is currently not the case because nobody implemented an easy and automated way to tell whether a port will build fine without Xcode.

[nomel]

Don't many of the dev command line tools, like clang, come from xcode?

[mnem]

The command line tools package includes all you need to compile with and is far smaller than Xcode. I think it's about 150mb.

[rsync]

Yes, that's true, and of course that's what I'd like to do (command line tools only), but last time through that was yet another ten minutes to find the correct xcode and match things up and so on ...

I fully accept that I'm just being a complainer here, but in answer to the parents question, those are the mental blocks for me.