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by headwayoldest 995 days ago
Ultimately users will go where the package maintainers are. There are more people out there willing and able to write Ruby today than Perl (Fink) or TCL (MacPorts).

I'm sure someone will start a macOS package manager based on python and yum to signal the waning days of those technologies.

2 comments

MacPorts has 36k active ports. Estimates I see online for the number of Homebrew formulae are less than 5k. TCL isn’t difficult to write and most Portfiles are just a bunch of whitespace-aligned key-value pairs.
I'm secretly hoping for a makepkg / pacman-based replacement to homebrew, to have the same set of commands and package naming conventions across mac / win / linux
There was one, and you can find it here: https://github.com/orgs/archmac/repositories

But it is unmaintained (it seems its author has moved on to Nix).

Wasn't there one? I know there is Nix for macOS, though it's probably not very maintained.
The Darwin nixpkgs is actually pretty active and healthy, in my experience.