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and then keeping them current takes quite a bit of infrastructure which is why fink's binary packages are really outdated at times.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