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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

It really depends.

The convenience of something like apt for quickly assembling or installing your machine with all software automatically updated is hard to beat. Mac OS also tends to ship with older versions of software and rarely gets newer versions without a full OS update - meaning they will get older and older with time.

OTOH, there are many scenarios where a Mac is the only option. Any development for iPhone or Mac is painful on other platforms.

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I use homebrew "for quickly assembling or installing your machine with all software automatically updated" and really have nothing to complain about. Mac OS X ships things like Python and Ruby, not because Apple envisions you will use those things to build custom applications but because there are system tools that depend on them. That's why upgrading these system packages too aggressively is a bad idea, even on Linux (and that's why RHEL is still on Python 2.4). You always have cleaner way to get and use newer versions of almost all packages without breaking the system.

I was lost without apt for a while too until I discovered homebrew.

The list of packages available in homebrew is growing at a pretty crazy rate as well. It's currently the most forked project on github (https://github.com/popular/forked).

I know I can coerce OSX into being a Unix-developer-friendly OS, but, unless you require the hardware it comes bundled with or some specific feature only OSX provides, why not start with a more server-like OS? Most of the servers I deploy to run Linux. If I develop and test everyday under Linux, I'll have less surprises when I deploy to production.

I don't see why upgrading packages (like Python or Ruby) is a bad idea. For instance I have Python 2 & 3 installed on my laptops (Arch Linux) and it just works well.

Well, macports/homebrew seem to fill the package manager gap pretty well. I upgraded to Lion the other day - one "port selfupdate && port upgrade" command and an hour of downloads/compiles later I had my dev environment back to normal including fresh compiles of php, postgres, apache, memcache, redis, imagemagick and any number of their dependencies.

With homebrew I didn't even have to do that, since the Lion upgrade leaves /usr/local and launchd alone. The only rough spot I had was installing the App Store version of XCode, because I was a dumbo and installed the beta version of XCode in /Developer (never do this).

hombrew is awesome! previously my big complaint about os x was the difficulty of installing packages a la linux. you can't really say that any more. perhaps it doesn't quite have the sheer size of packages, but what it does have is much more up to date than linux repos for the most part. it sucks that you have to pull down xcode to develop on mac(huge download, and i understand that many people doing development on a mac will never use it), but i'm doing iOS development anywho.

There's a standalone installer for gcc:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

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