Comments on: Moving from MacPorts to Homebrew

By: Derrell Piper

Derrell Piper — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:26:47 +0000

Being late to this party, I nonetheless have to comment.

I too have been with MacPorts from the beginning and while it’s my favorite of the BSD-derived package managers from a users perspective (i.e., figuring out how to make it do what you want), it’s mutated into a monster that’s constantly installing the entire X.org distribution, Perl, Python, and thousands of libfoos, most of which already exist in /usr/lib. Yes, I know, they’re not always compatible and don’t always work. But then again, the opposite is also true. The libraries in /usr/lib do what they do correctly in OS X. The stuff MacPorts installs, not so much. I understand why MacPorts went the direction they did, I just don’t want that on my system and brew seems to do exactly what I’m looking for. I also appreciate that it’s backed into github. I could care less that it’s written in Ruby.

Put away those stone knives and bearskins my friends…

By: bitboxer

bitboxer — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:28:54 +0000

THanks Aaron, I fixed it.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:43:56 +0000

The Github “gist” URL has once again changed, no idea why.

Instead of the “gist” subdomain and the “raw” path component, they now use a “raw” subdomain and a “gist” path component, so the correct command is now:

1	ruby -e "$(curl https://raw.github.com/gist/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"

By: bitboxer

bitboxer — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:06:41 +0000

Gabe, you can always go back using your TimeMachine, but I added a comment that you can move the stuff to another directory.

Basically for me it’s : delete everything from this monster as soon as possible .

By: Gabe Yarra

Gabe Yarra — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:59:29 +0000

These instructions are dangerous and shouldn’t be followed.

“sudo rm” ing all the macports stuff is a very bad idea. It’s much smarter to carefully move directories to a safe place, in their entirety, so the damage can be undone.

By: Homebrew versus MacPorts | lewis::blog

Homebrew versus MacPorts | lewis::blog — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:37:06 +0000

[...] So on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to get rid of MacPorts and try out Homebrew. Before nuking MacPorts, I made a short list of the ports I wanted to reinstall with Homebrew. To uninstall I followed these handy isntructions here. [...]

By: Anders Damsgaard Christensen

Anders Damsgaard Christensen — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:51:24 +0000

The gisthub-webpage has moved to a secure connection, so the install script is now run by typing:
ruby -e “$(curl https://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)”
Thanks for creating this guide!

By: Ryan Sandridge

Ryan Sandridge — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:41:35 +0000

Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure I read something back in 2007 when I set everything up that suggested doing it that way… perhaps the same reason people like Chris Wanstrath suggest installing MySQL via Homebrew instead of using the MySQL-Mac-Packages (http://ozmm.org/posts/homebrew___mysql___snow_leopard.html).

Incidentally, Homebrew installs MySQL databases under /usr/local/var/mysql… and copying my databases over to there from /opt/local/var/db seemed to work fine.

By: bitboxer

bitboxer — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:10:05 +0000

Yes, you were lucky. But that’s just another reason _not_ to use MacPorts . If you would use the MySQL-Mac-Packages your Database would be in /usr/local/mysql/data .

Why have you installed MySQL using MacPorts in the first place ?

By: Ryan Sandridge

Ryan Sandridge — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:36:06 +0000

Um, milosh makes some good points, and questions I myself have… but all the cool kids seem to be playing with Homebrew, so I’m checking it out myself (mostly because after updating to Snow Leopard, many of my MacPorts seemed to be hosed).

So here I am in the middle of installing things with Homebrew, and *thankfully* didn’t find your post until after I discovered that with MacPorts, some important *** DATA *** is stored under /opt/local. All my mysql databases live in /opt/local/var/db!

So, for those whose installations are similar to mine, and who follow your steps blindly, they will have just rm -rf’d all their data! Of course, hopefully they have backups! (something else you don’t mention doing).

Still, thanks for the post… as it does give a nice map of other directories that need cleaning after uninstalling MacPorts.