2) Don't put them in the PATH. They're prefixed with 'g' so you can make an non-prefixed alias for your interactive shell, and use the prefixed variant in your scripts if need be. If you write portable scripts you're either using common features or use some vars for those utils, aren't you?

3) g++? that's not in homebrew...

Honestly though, MacPorts is a real pain. That's why I worked with others to bring Arch's pacman on OSX (dubbed ArchOSX) some years ago, but binary hosting was proving being a chore, and then Homebrew started taking off, and in my case Just Works.

I'm the guy who implemented the feature and I am realising that as I didn't shout very loudly people don't realise that it exists.

For example Qt has a bottle: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...

The reason we aren't doing this for more packages is basically people power and hosting (as I'm not sure Sourceforge would be happy we hosting the number of binaries we'd want to have).

Hope that explains a bit. Feel free to comment if you think we're taking a good/bad approach here.

    3) g++? that's not in homebrew...

    Homebrew started taking off, and in 
    my case Just Works

In general Homebrew did a good job for me, but it did break on me a couple of times. And when it did, fixing it caused me a lot of stress, because in the end it's really not much better than "./configure && make && sudo make install".

What I don't understand is how come we can't have binary repositories, like Debian's. Certainly Debian has to handle much more architectures and the number of packages contained is really huge. So how come there isn't such an alternative for Mac OS X? Why are solutions like Homebrew and MacPorts insisting on compiling the packages locally?

    Homebrew started taking off, and in 
    my case Just Works

Here's another: it worked for me perfectly, in and of itself. I use pianobar, which frequently updates (due to Pandora changing protocol or keys), and I often have to do some recipe editing to get that latest update, but it seemed simple enough. Since the brew update list doesn't get fixes anything like as fast as the pianobar author updates when something breaks, it seems to me that having to wait for someone to actually compile pianobar elsewhere would mean that I'd have to wait days for the packaged version.

Unfortunately, building the packages and then keeping them current takes quite a bit of infrastructure which is why fink's binary packages are really outdated at times.

The other issue is with runtime-dependencies: Self-compiling packages gives you the freedom to, say, build vim without X11 support. With binary packages, the maintainer (or the packaging system) must create n packages for n possible combinations (if the project doesn't have some dynamic-library based plugin system) which is, again problematic from a resource-requirement perspective.

Apple are never going to provide Linux-style package management tools because the market for them is minuscule compared to Apple's real market: normal people. For normal people, there's the App Store.

It seems like the OP's point is pretty valid to me. I use an OS that gives me what I need to do my job.

No. They aren't. Developers have needs far greater than that of your average everyday user. Apple sells a machine that is the best possible for the greatest number of users, and doesn't really cater to niche markets. I don't get what's surprising about this.

Linux and Windows feel like they exist on opposite ends of the spectrum.

What they don't host is the source or compiled versions of any of the packages in the MacPorts repository - potentially for the same reason they include no GPLv3 software in their OS.

Its kind of like developing on windows, for windows, gota do what u gotta do.

So that an OS upgrade, in which Apple tends to include arbitrary upgrades to system libraries (or the Ruby/Python etc version), doesn't break whatever you installed with Homebrew/MacPorts.

This rarely fails. When it does, it's user error.

What do you mean? People are saying that about homebrew all the time. Have you read on blog posts on it?

It just worked for me too, and I have around 20-25 packages installed.

2) I am not talking about my own scripts, I am talking about other peoples. I could obviously go through and debug them, and then check I haven't broken them on a couple of linuxes, and a mac without macports/homebrew but... I don't want to.

3) You are right, it looks like gcc and gdb have both been taken out of homebrew, I assume because they didn't work. They were there previously.

Certainly I find homebrew very useful. Just now I noticed the one thing I used in fink in now in homebrew, so have removed fink which should also hopefully slove problems.

However, as time goes by, I find the OSX is getting slowly worse. In the days of OS X 10.1, the various command line tools were in sync between linux and mac os x, and now that is certainly not true, and I find the linux set more useful, especially in a default state.

Which is why the alias solution is nice, as it will only impact the interactive shell, not the scripts.

I've been using Homebrew for about a year and haven't ever had an issue like that.

I find it quite the contrary as it summons git power upon /usr/local. So the workflow is basically just editing live in /usr/local/Library/Formula ('brew create url' scaffolds in many cases, 'brew edit formula' gets you to an existing one), committing, and handling merges on pull (which is what 'brew update' does)

If you want to contribute back, fork on github and add your repo as a remote, then push and submit a pull request.

It's really different than apt (which it is normal as Debian packaging has a massively different scope) , but IMHO much, much simpler and efficient.

Bonus points for then using working, legal, VM's for the OSX moments. Or, if you like, just boot from a removable linux SSD for work, reboot for OSX.

I have a slight edge-case, where I would like to install Debian Mint onto a 32GB flash drive, and boot from that. I have a Macbook Air and disk space is at a premium.

Googling around has been to no avail.

If it's possible (though absolutely not necessary) – my OSX and Debian files could be shared when booted into either – that would be great!

You can but you'll have to share data on a non-journaled HFS+ partition for it to be writable from Linux. Watch out for UIDs/GIDs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Home_Sharing

ArchLinux has their img booting from usb, so I don't see why not.

Yeah, you could. Also, why install both? Anyway, welcome to software. It ain't perfect. You think it'll be better with Linux? I've had happen to me on Debian a few times, and lotsa times with RPMs. But even if it does not happen, there are several other software you cannot install on Linux, like, all Mac Cocoa Apps, from iWork to Photoshop. If you don't care about having access to those, then you don't need OS X in the first place.

I found 'brew install coreutils' broke some build scripts , which expected proper mac tools, if I put them all in path.

So, you generally wanted a Mac in order to install large quantities of third party unix software in the core system on top of same regular binaries???? Do you go install FreeBSD and then add a Linux userland? Do you install Debian/Ubuntu etc and then go change the system, say, Python? Because people that tried it also found it's a world of pain.

I can't comment on the memory, except that I find my 4GB of RAM seems to go much further when I dual-boot my macbook into Linux. It might happen to be the programs that I run.

You're doing it wrong.

Most software developers that use OS X just want a decent GUI on top of Unix. So yeah, they do generally want a Mac in order to install large quantities of third party Unix software.

Do you install Debian/Ubuntu etc and then go change the system, say, Python?

Yes. I have had no problems with it.

You're doing it wrong.

You're probably not doing enough to notice that memory usage absolutely sucks under OS X.

I use homebrew for almost all of the dependencies that I have, there are one or two that I compile by hand.

I've not had any issues. Best of all, I don't need the g* stuff to do my builds. I am perfectly happy with clang and the BSD tools available.

I don't understand why people purchase Mac OS X based computers then want to run GNU coreutils on top of it, or want to Linuxize their entire install. Off course something is going to break at that point, especially when build tools expect certain versions of certain tools to be available.

Because only Apple has figured out how to make and sell great laptops running Unix at a (relatively) reasonable price and where all the hardware and drivers just works out of the box. If I could have bought a computer as good as the macbook Air in every way, but with Linux instead of OS X and guarenteed zero driver or hardware comparability issues I would have. But I couldn't so I bought a Mac.

"Just works" is relative. Given that Apple controls both the Wifi card and the driver for their machines, and that it offers a limited range of such cards, it sure is better poised to "just work" than some obscure wifi card used in a PC alongside with some third-party open source driver for it. This is, pretty much, common sense.

So, as relativity goes, it's pretty much true, or Apple wouldn't hold the higher user satisfaction position of multiple years in a row, with over 20% distance from the second runner.

I wasn't making any statistical claims whatsoever. I replied to someone talking about "zero driver or hardware comparability issues".

For starters, you are not. You are just buying the equivalent of top-tier machines from other brands. If you compare the equivalents hw specs AND build quality (from the external design to the materials like aluminum used, to the extra cost for an unibody construction, to the extra engineering effort and cost to pack things lightly and thin, to the thunderbolt ports, to the display quality etc), you either end up same price, or cheaper or the thing doesn't exist at all in the PC side. Even worse with iPads and iPhones, which have competitors struggling to compete on price.

I expect to have driver issues fixed in short order

Well, I guess you can go to an Applestore and have the machine changed if it doesn't work, or get your money back.

But in general "X issue fixed in short order" is not how it works, even when buying mainframes for top dollar. Sometimes you just have to wait until the engineers find the root of the problem and come up with a solution. Sometimes it even takes the next generation of machines for the problem to be fixed, if it's a HW bug. Sometimes it never does, if it affects some small percentage of machines with some strange setup (e.g with that brand of router, when set to those settings, etc).

I replied to someone talking about "zero driver or hardware comparability issues".

If anyone claims "zero driver or hardware comparability issues, he is clearly delusional or just speaks for himself. iBooks circa 2003 even had their logic boards fail multiple times, for example. Or G5's had strange goo coming out from their cooling system. I had a failed DVD on a Macbook Pro. Still, the same kind of things happen to PC runs all the time (I've had too many such cases from '91 to '05), they are just so fragmented as a platform that you never get to hear from them.

A Macbook run is 10 million machines of the same* specs. How much is an Asus 105-SH/i-mkII run? Or a Dell run, considering it offers 2,000 build to order configuration combinations? 1% of a Macbook run in hundreds of thousands of people, 1% of those runs is like nothing, so you don't get to hear much. Not to mention that they don't have forums and sites dedicated to the machines, anyway, just broad websites for all PCs.

So when I said "I'm paying double what I would pay for other brands" I meant it literally, including the "I". The set of machines that meet my requirements includes machines from the likes of Toshiba that cost less than half of Apple's cheapest offering.

The reason why I still bought from Apple is that I need a Unix system and I hate dealing with driver issues. So having to deal with unfixed driver issues is the quickest way to drive me away.

(I did not downvote you by the way)

Then there are minor things like that there are no stores anywhere around here that sells them, meaning I'd have to buy one without playing with it first. Also it's basically impossible to buy one without a Swedish keyboard layout in Sweden, while Apple will happily let me choose any keyboard layout I want. None of these are deal-breakers in them selves but they're things that kind of add up.