> On Jan 25, 2021, at 11:41, Ken Cunningham <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> homebrew is in shambles.
> 
> their long-touted "no-sudo" and "no PATH" advantage from installing into 
> /usr/local has been eliminated by Apple as the horrible security threat it 
> always was. They have to retool into /opt/homebrew and make 10,000 builds 
> respect the build args now.

Whether /usr/local as a dumping ground already on everyone's path is evil or 
not, I think it's still there in Big Sur, right? (even if it is actually mapped 
from /System/Volumes/Data/usr/local)

Now maybe Big Sur won't allow open enough permissions for just anyone to write 
to /usr/local (that at least would be less scary, although a non-dumb admin 
could set /usr/local and interesting subdirectories to be writable by group 
admin, which would be a reasonable way of putting stuff in there by members of 
group admin only (who could put it in there anyway), without having it wide 
open OR using sudo.

But other than that, just what do you mean by the above? I don't do much 
homebrew since I mainly do MacPorts and don't want conflicts (a few things need 
/usr/local, like the Parallels and VirtualBox command line utilities that get 
put in there, but I don't want to dump too much in there); but there have been 
a couple of cases where homebrew had something that MacPorts didn't or wasn't 
as useful to me for.

> They stripped out all their universal handling code a few years ago, can't 
> put it back, and so can't do the critical universal builds any more. They 
> tell everyone universal is wasteful, lipo things manually, and run the x86_64 
> homebrew on Apple Silicon.

You'd know better about build issues than I, for sure; and although that's a 
plausible argument in favor of MacPorts, as long as homebrew has some software 
that MacPorts doesn't (and necessarily that will be the case, since they can 
also have recipes or whatever they call them for download/install of 
proprietary software, which MacPorts can't or won't), I don't see them simply 
going away, nor do I see people that find some benefit in them simply 
abandoning them.

> So MacPorts, which works great from 10.4 PPC to 11.x arm64, is the place to 
> be.


I'm not ready to switch my main system  (2019 16" MacBook Pro) past Catalina 
yet, because last I heard there were still some ports that worked there but not 
on Big Sur.

As far as that goes, I've heard that vpnd (the Apple-provided program that 
implements VPN server functionality), even though still present, doesn't work 
past Mojave, so my Mac Mini stays on that until I have an alternative that will 
work equally well with the laptop, iPad, iPhone, etc, when I'm away.  (I wish 
Apple would support both server and client L2TPV3 for full broadcast domain 
functionality in a VPN, but that's another story.) And that Mac Mini (plus a 
Mojave VM on my laptop) can also provide 32-bit app support, since AFAIK, Wine 
support for 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit-only OS's still isn't quite there, at 
least not for a free version.  Presumably there are still a few other 32-bit 
apps (and ports?) that aren't 64-bit ready yet, too.

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