NYCPHP Meetup

[Justin Hileman]

On 4/27/10 12:35 AM, John Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 12:20 AM, Justin Hileman
> <justin at justinhileman.info>  wrote:
>> Ugh. MacPorts used to be cool, before I started using Homebrew :)
>
> How is Homebrew better than MacPorts?  I am seriously curious.
>


Homebrew is built on git and really simple ruby "recipes".

Homebrew installs everything in version-specific isolated folders, then 
symlinks into `/usr/local` where local code really belongs :)

It's crazy simple to create your own Homebrew packages, just in case you 
have to install something from source.

It's crazy simple to modify existing Homebrew recipes... Because it's 
built on Git, any upstream changes can be automatically merged into your 
custom recipe.

Homebrew tries really hard not to mess with things that are installed 
elsewhere. MacPorts and Fink play fast and loose with versions and 
dependencies, and often install multiple copies of the same thing or 
existing libraries (i.e. your cli and Apache PHP versions will often be 
different).

Homebrew plays nice with ruby gems, easy_install, pear/pecl, etc.

Homebrew comes with bash-completion, so you can tab-complete all your 
package names. That's pretty hot.

If you don't like how something is done in Homebrew: fork, clone, 
commit, push and convince mxcl to accept your changes :)


-- 
http://justinhileman.com