MacPorts to Homebrew

On: February 17, 2011   By: Chris Robison   In: OS X

MacPorts

I've been using MacPorts for package management for quite some time, but not until recently did I realize it wasn't ideal.  When I tried to install mysql,  the port install was taking way too long and downloading a giant list of dependencies, among them things I already had like perl.  Why MacPorts doesn't use the existing packages I don't know.  I also learned that it has to compile everything it downloads.  This can be pretty inefficient, take up extra space, and end up using different version of things depending on what you are doing.

Enter Homebrew

I've been hearing about Homebrew off and on so I decided to look into it.  From what I've read its sexy and fast.  It installs to /usr/local/ and doesn't interfere with anything already installed there.  Homebrew checks for existing packages and won't grab them again, this is good and means I won't end up with several version of python or perl or whatever.  For larger packages, the compiled binaries will be downloaded instead of having to compile them on the spot, which will save a lot of time.  So, I've decided to just give it a shot.  I started by uninstalling MacPorts to have a clean slate.

Uninstall all install ports first:

sudo port -f uninstall installed

Then, remove all traces of MacPorts:

%% sudo rm -rf \
    /opt/local \
    /Applications/DarwinPorts \
    /Applications/MacPorts \
    /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
    /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
    /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
    /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
    /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
    /Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
    ~/.macports

Install Homebrew

Its pretty simple to get going with Homebrew, I could post how, but I'd recommend just going through the installation instructions as it contains a lot of good information on why you should do certain things.

Initial Impressions

For fun I ran a ``brew install wget``.  I already had wget from manually installing it.  Homebrew found it and updated it!  Previously I had installed tree using MacPorts so it was removed.  I used brew to grab it again and it installed in 2 seconds.  That's freakin' awesome.  Homebrew is fast.  I am pleased thus far.

This is has far as I have gotten.  I'll come back for an update with some feedback at a later date.

Posted in: OS X