On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 21:48, Scott Haneda <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm not sure why they felt they needed to position themselves as a MacPorts > replacement; why not a Fink replacement?
Because it's source-based only, to start with? Because they consider MacPorts as a better competitor than fink, which would be a compliment, or closer to what they are trying to achieve? > I also do not at all like that they symblink into a local dir from their > prefix. That seems a recipe for disaster. The way MacPorts is isolated was a > great design decision. /usr/local was exactly meant to isolate the base system from stuff installed on top. BSD ports system use /usr/local too. It is actually the tradition MacPorts does not follow, a tradition which proved efficient. Anyway you get to choose, and they explain why /usr/local is their default choice. http://wiki.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/installation Using symlinks is IMHO absolutely amazing. That's what alternatives systems (from Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora/Red Hat, the later being, I must precise for transparency, my employer) do when multiple implementations are available for the same tool, and extending that to versioning is actually what caught my eye as a brilliant design. > I'm not seeing a list of Homebrew installer ports/packages. Do they at least > have a working AMP stack, how is their php install and associated modules? [...] > Weird direction to take in releasing an alternative. Apparently someone out > there does not like MacPorts :) MacPorts being good does not mean one cannot do better... And taking technical considerations aside, the Ruby active developers community is huge (let's not compare to tcl), assuming making packages is in most cases as easy as they claim, that could make it grow REALLY fast. That's my experience as an ex big contributor to Arch Linux where most source packages were shorter than 20 lines of shell with mostly simple variable definitions and were most of the time lost on packaging was spent building and uploading built packages... > Who are the people behind this project? It's an open source community project, built on a decentralized SCM and with a very accessible codebase AFAIK. The whole point of those choices is that it's not a point :) I am thinking about using brew massively on top of a base Linux installation. It sounds really nice to easily keep track of multiple versions, the 'brew link'/'brew unlink' makes switching very easy. Plus you don't have to use their build system if you don't want to, just use the proper prefix at installation time... For someone playing with multiple versions of numerous projects (including dev. versions I just don't want to spend time packaging), this can be extremely convenient. -- Pierre Carrier _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
