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by carterschonwald 5620 days ago
its worth mentioning that mac homebrew already has a formula for installing this, and it builds and runs without a hitch.
1 comments
snprbob86 5620 days ago
Forgive the totally off-topic thread, but is Homebrew generally considered mature/stable?

I remember reading about it a year or so ago and being slightly skeeved out by the chmod and chown voodoo you had to do to install it. Skimming over the Homebrew install script seems like it does a lot of similar stuff, which seems strange for a package manager that claims isolated installation of packages in user-land.

And is it intended to completely replace MacPorts, or do they place nice together?

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wfarr 5620 days ago
It makes /usr/local owned by the current user rather than root. Not much in the way of voodoo. ;)

It's basically a replacement for MacPorts.

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snprbob86 5620 days ago
See this section of the hierarchical filesystem guidelines for unix-like OSes:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEUSRHIERARCHY

and in particular:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHI...

Isn't root supposed to own that?

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wfarr 5618 days ago
They're guidelines.

In the case of OS X laptops, they're almost uniformly used as single-user machines. This just takes the hassle of having to sudo to do it.

There are a few other reasons they specifically opted for /usr/local instead of other paths here: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation

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dcreemer 5620 days ago
Been using it as a replacement for MacPorts for many months. Works well, easy to maintain. I like it.
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