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Comment by oomkiller | Hacker News Reader

Ever hear of Macports or Homebrew? They have almost everything I need, usually with the most up to date version. No 2 year old stale packages like Debian.

Edit: Don't presume this for everyone.

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I used Fink and then Macports. Both were miserable. They did a terrible job with dependencies and many common things (MySql, memecache, ..) either weren't in them or wouldn't install properly. Homebrew concerned me because it defaults to using the base libraries installed by OS X.

That's really the core problem; on linux, all of the software on my machine is from the open source ecosystem and it tends to follow the unix patterns and work well together. On OS X, it was a mix of open source and what comes out of Jobs' Garden. It also meant that ports to OS X package systems were always behind linux.

I've never used Fink, but the main problem I had with MacPorts is that it pulls down so much stuff and takes forever to compile things, since it doesn't use the built-in stuff.

I can understand your trepidation when using XCode to build things, but in reality I've never had any trouble using Homebrew. The packages are updated often, and if you want to contribute something, it's super easy (I've done it myself), since they're on Github.

macports and homebrew are ok but for many projects, there are linux-specific extensions that arent properly ported.

For example, epoll is not supported (and I haven't seen a good epoll wrapper for kqueue)

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