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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried MacPorts? It builds everything from source anyway, so there's a reasonable chance more things will work.

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General note, MacPorts does not build everything from source anymore, and it hasn't for a while. MacPorts will try to find a precompiled binary on packages.macports.org, then fall back to building from source if a binary is not available.

That said—while I don't know whether ARM actually works yet, MacPorts still supports PowerPC wherever possible, so they have a long history of managing multiple architectures. I expect they'll have a somewhat easier time with ARM as a result.

Edit: MacPorts does indeed support ARM as of the latest release! https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-announce/2020-...

No, it has no more reasonable chance than Homebrew. Homebrew has always supported building from source. Bottles did not originally exist. All M1 Homebrew packages are presently being built from source, because there are no Apple Silicon bottles. It is the source packages that need to be updated and patched to work on Apple Silicon, and that is true whether you use MacPorts, Homebrew, or build them yourself from scratch.

Exactly. I keep having to explain this to colleagues. For some stuff, it’s just going to take time.

And I can also envision that certain packages might not get updated, necessitating a fork to patch them for M1.

I’m interested in how homebrew and others will handle that (so official package x chooses not to patch/accept a patch for whatever reason, leading to a fork of package x with a patch applied), presumably to avoid namespace collisions/not giving the user what they want, there could be an error message that states that an ARM64 version doesn’t officially exist but links it to the fork and gives the option to install that instead. And then there could be a flag to always allow linked-replacements if an official patch doesn’t exist.

since this is homebrew we are talking about the solution will be whatever is the most user hostile.

Sorry if you have that impression. If you’re interested in a constructive discussion, feel free to give an example and tell me how you think we should handle it better in the future.

You proved yourselves to be untrustworthy by opting everyone into analytics using Google and hiding the notice in lots of terminal output. You guys doubled down on that by refusing to reconsider, saying unless you were a contributor to the project, your opinion was irrelevant. Mike McQuaid's responses as a representative of the project were user hostile, all while he tried to paint himself as the victim of abuse over the matter.

If you want to regain my trust, remove the analytics function, swear off such things forever, and expel Mike McQuaid from the project. But I doubt that will happen, so MacPorts it is. And I'll encourage everyone I know to use it rather than Homebrew.

Again, sorry you feel that way about Homebrew’s analytics. I think we’ve learned a lot from our mistakes here. If the way the analytics notice is implemented now is still a no-go for you, I can’t blame you for moving on. MacPorts is a fine package manager, too.

One thing I still want to point out though: whatever we do, we do it in good faith and with the best of intentions for both our users and ourselves.

The only gripe I have ever had with Homebrew is the /usr/local "do yourself a favor" prefix, due to its collision with so many 3rd-party installers. But that's now been fixed.

Homebrew's policy is to not apply patches that upstream doesn't accept, though I do notice that they are sometimes applying patches to the build systems themselves to patch in some of the paths to include files living deep inside the macOS SDK.

Given that policy I would assume that such a package might die until somebody forks it and takes on responsibility for maintenance.

Homebrew is about building and installing upstream packages, not about installing and maintaining custom forks of packages.

It's worth noting, btw, that this is another major difference between Homebrew and MacPorts. MacPorts maintains tons of their own patches, whether to make software work at all or just to add support for older or newer OS's.

... which is a blessing and a curse: When they are doing a good job, that's perfect because it means that some software which wouldn't run correctly now runs correctly.

When they are doing a bad job, they might anger maintainers ("I didn't add this bug - this was added by macports - complain to them!"), or they might introduce additional security issues not present in the upstream package (see the Debian openssl bug from 2008)

It might also mean that you're not getting the latest versions of upstream packages because adding those patches and rebasing them on top of upstream changes takes time.

Being close to upstream was a selling-point of homebrew back in the days when it was just a collection of scripts to make it easier to build original source distributions of common Unix software.

MacPorts handles multiple architectures a bit better. Of course the usual "this software doesn't compile on ARM" issues are still there.

Another option might be pkgsrc, I'm sure someone's already looking at it.

https://www.pkgsrc.org/

It's weird that in any homebrew/macports discussion I don't see much at all about pkgsrc. Is it not any good? Has issues? No "market share"?

The package selection is fairly limited. I tried it recently and was disappointed that neither neovim nor ripgrep are packaged. It also has little mindshare. I found out by accident that it was available for macOS.

That's too bad. It looks pretty good command line wise.

using macports wouldn't make it such that "more things will work". it's really about the applications now needing to be compiled in the ARM architecture.

here are some examples:

aom: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/57976

boost: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/59257

...

if you notice the code changes for the items above, they make changes to detect if the compile target is ARM and make the necessary changes so it would compile.

I loved MacPorts, greatly preferred it over Brew, and used it all the time on Mac OS back then on my PowerBook and my dying Mac Mini, but doesn't Apple's notarization requirement make it impossible to compile from source to create runnable binaries?

No. Even with Gatekeeper enabled, running binaries that you compile from source on your own machine doesn't require that they be notarized. As of Big Sur, they must be _signed_, but can be self-signed by a certificate you create locally. No need for Apple's approval in any way. I don't know what the status of supporting this new requirement in MacPorts (or Homebrew) is, but it's certainly something that can be dealt with.

Then let's hope Apple doesn't alter the deal further.

Why would they?

They slowly tighten the screws with each release; by now it should be noticeable for most people.

Yes they do. But the question is, why would they make a decision that will instantly make the machine completely unusable for a substantial portion of their clientele? Also, the portion that arguably gives MacBooks and, especially, iOS devices their value.

Since Gatekeeper was originally announced I've seen people claiming that Apple were going to lock down macOS so Homebrew wouldn't work any more. I've never seen evidence that this will actually happen (and the people I speak to at Apple point to the opposite).

Apple's linker will automatically adhoc sign binaries on AS systems so it shouldn't require any work for most people.

Anything run from the Xcode UI (or Terminal if you use "spctl developer-mode enable-terminal" to show the Developer Tools group under Security > Privacy in System Preferences) and enable Terminal is exempt from GateKeeper notarization checks. You can also put other terminal clients in the same list and they get the same benefit (child processes exempt from GateKeeper).

In a similar note "DevToolsSecurity -enable" allows any admin or member of the _developer group to use the debugger or performance tools without authing first. (Normally you must auth the first time and the authorization can expire if you don't unlock your system after a certain amount of time).

> In a similar note "DevToolsSecurity -enable" allows any admin or member of the _developer group to use the debugger or performance tools without authing first.

Oh nice! That was a big annoyance on older systems; glad to see they've fixed it.

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