[thomnific]

Ugh, ugh, ugh. I just tried Homebrew for the third time the other day and it made a complete mess of my /usr/local/bin and also screwed up my install of rvm ... never again will I give it a chance. Sorry, but IMO Homebrew is crufty, opinionated software with poor separation of concerns. Macports is the (objectively?) better choice for my needs.

[Osmium]

> it made a complete mess of my /usr/local/bin

In that case you might be glad to hear that in v1.0.0:

> Homebrew’s default repository installation location changed to /usr/local/Homebrew to keep your /usr/local cleaner

Personally, I really like Homebrew and have never had problems (c.f. MacPorts which gave me big problems a few years ago), but I don't use /usr/local for much else, so that's probably why.

[thomnific]

Heh, fair enough and thank you, good to know :) Maybe in another year or two my frustration will have abated somewhat. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the devs recognized using /usr/local/bin was a bad decision (even if they were kind of forced to because of Apple's SIP).

However -- I just remember, when Homebrew was getting started, all the supercilious (dare I say arrogant?) advice in the docs ... oh, just install to /usr/local, "seriously", etc. (Looking for a reference in archive.org right now ...) Even their whole "Macports driving you to drink?" thing rubbed me the wrong way -- maybe I'm humour-deficient, but I think to criticize another project when your alternative isn't clearly better is just bad taste.

That being said, I am genuinely curious: is there any one awesome thing is that Homebrew does that Macports can't do? Or better, what kind of problems arise from using Macports? I recognize that packaging in Ruby is probably more convenient than in TCL, but other than that? It seems to me that Homebrew is just getting closer to what Macports did (correctly) in the first place. The only way Macports has ever inconvenienced me is requiring a fresh install from time to time when Apple updates their OS, which (for my use case) is minor.

[eddieh]

MacPorts isn't without problems, but I can't use Homebrew. Just the message that is printed when you `brew install texlive` is a deal breaker. I don't want to manage packages separately from my package manager, that's crazy and defeats the purpose of a package manager.