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A comment on Fake Name Generator. Parent comment

Re:Fake Name Generator by _delirium on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @11:20AM (#7096178)
Once you start piling up some dependencies (vs. self-constained apps), I found homebrew more of a mess, while MacPorts more or less worked as I'd expect. The thing that drove me off Homebrew was dependency-hell with different versions of Python packages, while MacPorts pulled in the right versions of all the dependencies (it can even handle needing multiple versions of NLTK/SciPy/etc. installed in parallel, if different ports depend on them). This is perhaps the flipside of the reason many people prefer Homebrew: it tends to build against the base OSX stuff, while MacPorts tends to pull in its own parallel world of dependencies. IME the latter works more reliably, though it takes up more diskspace.

But, Debian's package management works better than either of them, so I've sort of been moving towards doing any kind of unixy work in a VM and treating OSX as just a desktop.

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Re:Fake Name Generator by JonnieCache on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @12:33PM (#7096767)
It's possible to end up in a different circle of dependency hell with macports, where it insists on installing 10 different versions of everything at great length, when you already had a perfectly good one. If I'm not a python or perl developer, I don't want to compile many different point releases of those language ecosystems just to run some little utility scripts. And then of course everything is connected to everything else, so you can end up trying to solve graph theory problems when you're meant to be working.

Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.

(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)

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Re:Fake Name Generator by lae on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @12:53PM (#7096927)
I'm a *NIX admin and actually, when it comes to OSX I'd rather go the VM route than homebrew/macports (either way, I don't run OSX daily).
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