On 2021-4-4 11:35 , Craig Treleaven wrote:
On Apr 3, 2021, at 8:21 PM, [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I see this misconception /all over the place/, that Homebrew is fast
because it uses prebuilt binaries, whereas MacPorts makes you wait
while software is compiled. It can't /just/ be due to outdated
information, if we're more than a decade out from when the buildbot
went live.
I know it's just one data point, but I thought the replies I got on
this Hacker News comment today were interesting. I can understand why
he/she got confused, and I wonder if there's anything MacPorts could
do to make it clearer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26678498
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26678498>
It happens that I just did a self update and upgraded 20 ports on 10.15.
6 or the 20 were built from source. I believe this is higher than
usual due to the backlog on the 10.15 builbot. Even in the best case,
however, a fair number of ports will be built from source for the
well-known reasons. It would be interesting to know, say, how many of
our most-requested ports are always built from source.
https://ports.macports.org/statistics/ports/?days=30&first=-req_count&second=-total_count&third=port
<https://ports.macports.org/statistics/ports/?days=30&first=-req_count&second=-total_count&third=port>
Eg, git is our second-most requested port and it is always built from
source AFAIK.
Almost any reasonably complex package will have some of its dependencies
that must be built from source.
To the average user, I would suggest that we should emphasize that
MacPorts installs binaries whenever allowed by licensing but makes a
serious effort to avoid contravening the various open source licenses.
Plus MacPorts offers many more options (“variants”) to customize
installations and offers a wide breadth of packages.
I wrote a new FAQ and slightly reworded the one about universal
binaries. The latter was originally written before the buildbot existed,
so it was saying "build" where "install" is now more accurate. However
+universal is still a non-default variant and so very often won't be
available as a binary.
- Josh
