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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

MacPorts is strictly superior to HomeBrew and does not take the same eff you stance towards its users that HB has in the past.

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Genuine question: in what ways have they been hostile to their users? I use it all the time and haven’t noticed anything (which isn’t to say you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen it).

Once your macOS version reaches n-3, you start seeing this message constantly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37665120

Why must the makers of this platform for keeping software up-to-date be so obsessed with people running up-to-date software?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37672354

The entitlement of users calling open source maintainers that try to limit the surface area of support tickets to the systems that provably 95% of users are on “user hostile” is always sad to see.

The sociopathy of people who pretend "it's user-hostile to be told you can never speak of running this on an OS version > 2 years old. Ever. All attempts will be deleted" is "expecting endless support for free products that I'm not paying for or contributing to."

I reject your name-calling via a strawman, though I support the message.

Is that it? That just reads to me like a project that’s tired of getting bug reports from people on old versions of software.

telemetry by default

They caused a huge commotion some years back when they removed the entire concept of variants from ports/formulas, removing the ability to set any build time options whatsoever, breaking all patches for older platforms, etc. maintainer was quite rude about it when asked to reconsider by huge numbers of users that could no longer use the software.

Try interacting with them and you’ll know. If you just use it, (and your OS isn’t too old) then you wouldn’t feel it. And also good luck if they make some changes that affect you.

A better way to describe it might be contributor-hostile than user hostile. In a typical open source project, opening an issue is considered to be a contribution, a pull request is even better. Try doing any of these and be prepared to be harassed.

It is a very toxic open source project. Sadly homebrew cask is irreplaceable.

I remember when they renamed python to python3 or something similar. A lot of people were unhappy, and the maintainer's response was a very rude deal-with-it. It's apparently how he behaves toward people in general.

At the time it felt pointlessly rude but now I realise that the man works for free, and gets to be the king of his own turf. Not all software projects need to be a direct democracy. He doesn't owe us anything.

Wasn’t python3 a breaking change that pedantically replaced print with print() breaking every pre-existing python file requiring it to be reworked before it would function? Seems like calling python 2.x python and 3.x python3 was the correct decision and saying “this is final” is also correct.

Your point about project owners having final word is well taken, but in this case possibly also objectively correct.

I don't remember the exact details, but it was a breaking change that got people upset. It's not really about who was right or wrong, but how it was communicated.

That person has repeatedly been very curt with people as a matter of policy.

The last time I used MacPorts it fell out of popularity and did not have nearly as many packages as Homebrew had. It's unfortunate. Homebrew is dogshit slow.

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