[Baypiggies] Novice Programmer Asking For Assistance

[Ned Deily]

In article <03CAA432-5B22-4A6B-870D-050AFA1AF092 at gmail.com>,
 William Deegan <bdbaddog at gmail.com> 
 wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2012, at 4:27 PM, Ryan Matthew Balfanz 
> <rbalfanz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm surprised people are still using MacPorts when Homebrew 
> > (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) exists...
> I tried brew, but it didn't have all the packages I wanted, so back to 
> macports for me.

Another reason for using MacPorts: if you have requirements to support 
multiple multiple versions of OS X.  I currently have virtually the same 
set of ports, all current, installed on OS X 10.8, 10.7, 10.6, 10.5, and 
10.4 (although I admit that, not surprisingly, an increasing number of 
ports are starting to break on 10.4).  There's nothing wrong with 
Homebrew as far as it goes but its goals are less ambitious than 
MacPorts and it ends up making more compromises that don't always work 
out.  There is a good reason that MacPorts is more complex under the 
covers: it's really hard to get all those third-party components to work 
together and on most of the environments supported by OS X.  The FUD 
about MacPorts that gets passed around is really unfortunate.  Also, 
MacPorts now automatically provides binary packages for many of its 
ports on some releases of OS X.  The project is working to expand the 
availability to more releases.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org