What are pros and cons for MacPorts, Fink and Homebrew?

Question

I'm just migrating from Ubuntu Linux to Mac, and everything is new and I'm re-learning a lot of stuff.

On Linux I had the excellent apt-get to manage software packages. I googled for an alternative on Mac and found about MacPorts, Fink and Homebrew.

I will use this computer primarily to develop Ruby on Rails applications.

So, what are the differences between them? Which are the upsides and downsides? Which one is best maintained and has more packages?

Answer 1

Definitely Homebrew. I started with Fink, then switched to MacPorts (happier), then Homebrew (much, much happier). These are my reasons for using each (a pro list if you will):

Fink

• Apt-based - feel right at home if you come from a Debian-based environment
• Binary packages - packages are available as binaries so no long compile times. Practically though I've found that the pre-compiled binaries were always outdated and I had to compile stuff for my system anyways
• Decent selection of packages

MacPorts

• Biggest selection of packages/ports
• Generally very up to date
• Nice variants system that lets you customise the build
• Easy and intuitive port files

Homebrew

• Very up to date
• Maximum leveraging of what comes with OS X. Unlike Fink or MacPorts, it does not require you to build/install ruby and libraries from scratch just to install some small Ruby-based tool.
• Installs into /usr/local so does not need you to modify PATH anywhere
• Everything owned by user, so no packages ever need potentially risky root access to install
• Every installed package is cleanly sandboxed into its own cellar so you don't have stray files all over your system, just symlinks from bin, man, etc.
• Ridiculously easy to create your own formula files (ie. package descriptors)
• Since you're from a ruby background, another plus is everything is written in ruby and all forumlas are simple ruby scripts

Answer 2

MacPorts

It is more independent of Mac OS X, this means MacPorts will just ignore many of the system libraries and softwares that already available in Mac OS X and pull its own one instead, which could be slower when the utility you install requires some set of large libraries and softwares.

But this kind of choice is safer because the packages you installed are less influenced by Apple's system update/upgrade procedure.

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Homebrew

It is more dependent on existing Mac OS X installed packages, so this will speed up the installation of packages and minimize redundant libraries.

But the risk is installed packages might be broken because of Apple's system update/upgrade.

So, these are the two different kind of tradeoff.

Also, Homebrew takes over /usr/local by default, with which some folks don't like this because it somehow conflict with the unix-tradition and might cause problems if you’ve already installed anything there (MySQL, etc.)

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Apart from these differences, considering the packages these two can offer, you can check with these two commands if you already have MacPorts/Homebrew installed, which show you the packages they currently provided:

port list | wc -l
brew search | wc -l

And you will find out that MacPorts has much more packages than Homebrew.

(16917 v.s 2298 for now.)