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Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, MacPorts and Homebrew are both great options if you want to build packages from source, and your needs aren't too obscure. Lots of people, even in the Linux world, love source-based packaging systems.

But I'm massively impatient, and I want my packages _right now_. :-) So I prefer binary packaging systems.

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I've never used it, but Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/) is basically apt for OSX.

When I last used Fink (years ago), it was "apt for OS X" in roughly the same way that an off-brand Android tablet is an iPad: It looks more or less like the same thing, but you just don't get the same experience.

Does anyone use Fink these days?

I occasionally look, and see squat. I think everyone's gone to MacPorts, though Homebrew is gaining a bit of traction; enough to be useful, nowhere near enough to be reliable.

I've been perfectly happy in my little corner of the developer landscape (mostly Rails, plus random experiments) with Homebrew.

I've had friends of mine complain loudly after ~5 minutes when they find missing "essential" packages, though.

man port <man> -b binary-only mode (build and install from binary archives, ignore source, abort if no archive present; do not create/recreate binary archives from source) (only applies when archive mode is enabled) </man>

another option is pkgsrc.org. i use it on a few different platforms with good success. if only macosx is your target, use macports.

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