[msbarnett]

For a while at least, when Homebrew was getting popular, MacPorts seemed highly moribund and destined to be abandoned. It seems to have recovered some life since then, though.

Homebrew got big in the ruby community first -- I distinctly remember trying to get Rails to work with MacPorts' MySQL install and the whole thing turning into a clusterfuck, and then someone introducing me to homebrew where the whole thing just worked smoothly because every other Rails dev was walking the same path.

Homebrew exploded among ruby devs because adding new recipes to it was a couple of orders of magnitude easier (just write a few lines in a simple ruby DSL and send a pull request on Github) than MacPorts (hack about in bash cruft and then, what, open a ticket somewhere with a patch to ask for someone with an SVN commit bit to commit it, I guess?

[teacup50]

Nothing really changed in terms of MacPorts liveliness; development continued as it always had, and Homebrew has gradually learned why MacPorts adopted the solutions it did -- usually the hard way.

Homebrew's popularity was built on incredibly negative (and often dishonest) marketing that painted MacPorts as old and busted.

For example, Homebrew touted the security advantages of not using sudo, as compared to MacPorts, ignoring the fact that:

1) MacPorts dropped privileges when performing port builds to an unprivileged user, providing generally higher security than running with the current user's full permissions.

2) MacPorts has always also supported non-root installations that didn't require sudo.

[briandear]

Dishonest marketing? Really? Homebrew, a free tool was out spreading lies about MacPorts? That's ridiculous. When pretty much every major Ruby shop uses Homebrew, why would I want to kick around with MacPorts? I trust Thoughtbot, Pivotal, etc, far more than the two guys actually using MacPorts. Perhaps Homebrew 'won' in that particular community because it was better, ever considered that? Wide community adoption is a far bigger incentive to use a tool over potentially trivial conceptual disagreements.

[teacup50]

> Dishonest marketing? Really? Homebrew, a free tool was out spreading lies about MacPorts? That's ridiculous.

Ridiculous? Homebrew's marketing tagline was "MacPorts driving you to drink? Try homebrew!". The (obviously uninformed) slams of MacPorts and Fink didn't stop there.

It was the first time I'd ever seen negative marketing against a competing OSS project.

> When pretty much every major Ruby shop uses Homebrew, why would I want to kick around with MacPorts?

That wasn't the case then, was it?

> I trust Thoughtbot, Pivotal, etc, far more than the two guys actually using MacPorts.

Yes, this is the kind of specious negative marketing Homebrew specialized in.

> Perhaps Homebrew 'won' in that particular community because it was better, ever considered that?

Sure, I considered that. Then I objectively reviewed Homebrew's claims.

[shadowmint]

> obviously uninformed...

Perhaps you never didn't use macports or fink a few years back?

They were terrible.

Perhaps, now, they're slightly better, but there was a time about oh... 2 years ago, when macports specifically actually made me want to punch my computer.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say, that for me, personally, every complaint leveled against them was absolutely spot on.