MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

https://trac.macports.org/post/macports-200-now-available/

by st3fan • 15 years ago

88 39 15 years ago

trac.macports.org

mishmash• 15 years ago

Thanks to everyone involved!

dotBen• 15 years ago

I've been a happy homebrew user since it launched - anyone care to comment on the benefits/improvements of MacPorts V2 over homebrew?

celsius1414• 15 years ago

Familiarity in my case -- for my legacy Mac servers I'm sticking with what both I and my boxen know. :) New servers will all be running Linux, so it'll be with the package manager for that distro, likely Debian.

phr• 15 years ago

Last time I looked, MacPorts had a more paranoid approach to dependencies. That can be good and bad. Homebrew can be easier to use, until you run into a corner case that trips it up. MacPorts can be frustrating in how many dependencies it will insist on installing its own version even though the system-provided version might have worked.

I've gone back and forth. For a while homebrew could install a working GHC for me while I wasn't having any luck with MacPorts. Later something else caused me to switch back to MacPorts. Neither is perfect. Even MacPorts only allows dependencies at the package level, without regard to variants, or versions, if I recall correctly.

niels_olson• 15 years ago

There are some variant packages, eg, php5.2.x vs 5.3.x

sjs• 15 years ago

For those of us who haven't hit homebrew's edge cases in years of use are probably fine to keep using homebrew. If it ain't broke...

I just want it to install packages. It does that so I'm happy.

dgallagher• 15 years ago

MacPorts 2.0 fixed all of the issues that I was having under Lion with 1.9.0. Thanks for upgrading guys! :)

To upgrade, make sure you install Xcode 4.1 via the App Store (free). That'll provide GCC. After:

    $ sudo port selfupdate
    $ sudo port upgrade outdated

All old versions of Xcode (4.0.x/3.x) do not work with Lion.

amichail2• 15 years ago

w3m crashes. Is there a workaround?

st3fan• 15 years ago

Check if there already is a bug regarding w3m at

  https://trac.macports.org/search?q=w3m

If not, file one at:

  https://trac.macports.org/auth/login/?next=/newticket

nathos• 15 years ago

Upgrading to Lion is a great time to make the switch to Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

philfreo• 15 years ago

Benefits over MacPorts? Which has more up-to-date packages?

kylewpppd• 15 years ago

I'd go for sheer package numbers, and also MacPorts traditionally has had much better support for Python packages, and the rudimentary python_select.

Macports says they have 8199 packages. Brew has 1626 by my unscientific count (hint: $('table.tree-browser tr').length ).

A major difference is in how packages are installed. Brew by default will use native OS X packages. Macports installs all dependencies to /opt/local. So a trivial install for Brew could lead to a long install in Macports. I've had Macports build GCC.

But this new version is supposed to allow for pre-compiled binaries. So maybe a lot of that beef will disappear?

stock_toaster• 15 years ago

I made the switch to homebrew fairly recently (within the last two months).

Things I like:

* I install everything to ~/.brew/ and it works great. I did _not_ like their documented recommendation to install everything to /usr/local and chown it as your user. I have yet to run into any issues installing to my home dir.

* Installs of things have fewer deps, or at least perceived, compared to macports. Nice to not have a separate copy of everything. I haven't run into issues (yet!) where an OS update makes something puke, so this could be a problem down the road, but so far so good.

* Upgrades are very simple: brew update / brew upgrade

* Toolset is easy to work with.

* timely updates

llimllib• 15 years ago

1) Brew doesn't hide my stuff in /opt/macports/opt/package/ports/port/python/etc/etc/etc

2) Brew packages are simple to make and inspect. Many people make and inspect them. Bug fixes happen quickly.

kkowalczyk• 15 years ago

Maybe things have changed but I switched from MacPorts to homebrew in the early days of homebrew (2009?) because it was way easier to install.

MacPort's package installer tools mystified me. Homebrew could be improved too, but is better.

Finally, homebrew seems more open to contributions and because they use GitHub, it's very easy to contribute new packages and the high level of activity on Homebrew reflects that. I briefly looked at what it would take to contribute to MacPorts and it was harder.

acangiano• 15 years ago

Brew doesn't install the whole universe and take hours to install a small utility. MacPorts does.

micampe2• 15 years ago

The benefit is that Homebrew uses what you already have in the system, without creating its own separate world where it rebuilds everything even if a perfectly working version is already provided.

riobard• 15 years ago

Homebrew tries to reuse system packages as much as possible. MacPorts comes with its own everything.

Homebrew tends to have fresher packages---new versions of popular packages are usually updated within hours.

Haven't look back to MacPorts since switched to Homebrew two years ago.

kaffeinecoma2• 15 years ago

Giving this a try now. While I'm waiting for XCode to download, can anyone comment on the best way to get Apache httpd running on OSX? Is there a Homebrew package for this?

I use Apache to front Tomcat on a linux server, but it would be really handy to be able to test stuff locally on my Mac before copying changes up to the server.

selvakn• 15 years ago

Im not sure about Lion, but OSX comes with built in apache server. Goto System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing

mrcharles• 15 years ago

I am intrigued by the overwhelming support for Homebrew here -- is there a web resource for package lists so I can see if it will work for me? I haven't been able to google one up.

I don't use macports a lot, I think the biggest things I have installed are Python 2.7, PIL, and Hg.

daviddavis• 15 years ago

Homebrew is just a Ruby project in git so all the packages (or formulas) are just rb files inside the project:

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula

They usually only provide the most recent stable version of each project but you can find other formulas on the web and just run:

brew install [url]

amichail2• 15 years ago

Is there any chance MacPorts would get the Terminal proxy icon to work with the fish shell?

Groxx• 15 years ago

Don't care. Switched to Homebrew. Much happier - no double-installs unless I want to, faster fixes, and waaaaay faster interaction. How MacPorts manages to run so slowly is beyond me.

MacPorts has been annoying since day one, but it worked where there was nothing else truly competitive (Fink? Everything bad in MP, plus even slower updates. Only benefit is the sometimes-functional binary installs). Now we have Homebrew, and it's way better, if it has fewer legacy recipes (though not always).

malkia• 15 years ago

Had a problem (Macbook Pro, which I bought in Jan-2008) with upgrading to 2.0

After "debugging"-it, e.g: port -v self update

it gave me some mysterious problem of SQLite missing 64-bit version from... /Library/Mono.Framework/.../sqlite.dylib - don't remember the details.

Found some notes how to uninstall mono from their site (little script), and then "port selfupdate" went fine.

alimbada• 15 years ago

New Mac user here (~5+ weeks). Just echoing what others have said about Homebrew here so far:

After some research, MacPorts looked painful to install/maintain so I went with Homebrew seeing as it looked like there was more activity going on there as well as being easy to contribute to via github and what looked like a short tutorial on creating and contributing your own packages (+ a bit of ruby knowledge) if I felt the need.

I like it simple. :)

brown9-2• 15 years ago

As a point of contrast - I've been using OS X for about 8 weeks and I had some problems when first installing Homebrew (I do not remember the specifics, but I seem to recall some issues with installing iPython and the modules I wanted to use) - and since giving MacPorts a try I've really had no issues with it.

My only advice on MacPorts is to always do a dry-run before installing packages (port -y install), to see what dependencies will be dragged in - installing num.py wanted to re-compile a numerical computing package from scratch which I had to kill after a few hours of compilation (with no visible progress on the command line).

sudonim• 15 years ago

Congrats to the MacPorts team for 2.0 and lion support. It's unusual in a HN thread that most of the talk is about an alternative to the posted topic. However, I have to tip my hat to the work the MP team but it would be irresponsible to recommend it over Homebrew. Homebrew is what a package manager should feel like.

MacPorts 2.0 with Lion support now available

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