On Mar 23, 2022, at 08:48, Michele Venturi wrote: > If MacPorts is not a package manager we need one, > I'd say HomeBrew could be the right tool for the job.
I'm not sure what these remarks are in regards to, but MacPorts was started in 2002 a ports collection [1] based conceptually on FreeBSD Ports, meaning that it builds things from source on the user's system using a recipe. In 2011 MacPorts 2.0.0 was released which included the capability to download precompiled archives from servers, thus saving the user the need to compile it themselves, while still retaining the ability for them to do so should they wish to or need to. Shortly thereafter we began producing such archives for Mac OS X 10.6 on our servers, and we added archives for subsequent OS versions as they were released over the years. In that capability, MacPorts is like a package manager [2]. In my view it is a combination of both. Homebrew is a MacPorts competitor which came onto the scene in 2009. We welcome this friendly competition. Homebrew developers sometimes take patches or ideas from MacPorts; we sometimes take patches from them (and from anywhere else we can find them of course). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_collection [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager
