macports-www VS Task

macports - https://www.macports.org

I switched to MacPorts after becoming tired of Brew tainting my filesystem.

MacPorts keeps things clean in /opt/local.

https://www.macports.org/

https://saagarjha.com/blog/2019/04/26/thoughts-on-macos-pack...

gh is available via Homebrew, MacPorts, Conda, Spack, Webi, and as a…

I've read the article but some questions still remain. Does Retroactive install the shared dylibs of previous macOS releases? Or does it use an approach similar to https://www.macports.org/ ?

I highly recommend using yt-dlp to download videos in the highest quality available from a wide variety of web sites (notably YouTube, hence the "yt" in the name, but it supports a ton of sites). The best way to install it is with an open-source package manager, either Homebrew or MacPorts. These make it easier to install dependencies like Python 3.11 and optional (but highly recommended) utilities like ffmpeg. Both Homebrew and MacPorts are great, and you can install both side-by-side. I guess I'd recommend Homebrew over MacPorts because it downloads pre-built binaries instead of compiling from source, so it's faster. But again, they are both great.

This is Reddit so they will most likely be people who say to download Macports, but frankly, I don't care, and homebrew is enough for me. I'm not smart, but I know not to download programs/random things without prior research, don't use sudo commands on things you don't know and don't enter your password if you feel unsafe.

The initial setup was quick and painless, but I quickly realized that MacOS does not ship with a package manager (to my surprise!) the Apple Store won't be enough to cover my needs, so onto Google I went. I learned that the two most popular package managers are Homebrew and MacPorts. After reading for a while, I found some users concerned about how Homebrew managed folder permissions (here and here), and with the fact that it installs already compiled binaries, which may be a security/privacy issue. However, it seems that the folder issue was addressed with the ARM release of Homebrew, which now installs under the /opt/homebrew folder.

On Linux, most distributions come with their own package manager out of the box (e.g. Ubuntu / Debian has APT). One annoying thing about macOS as a development platform is that it does not come with one out of the box, and Homebrew has emerged as the most popular third-party management by far. There are other ones like MacPorts as well but I think this is the kind of thing where the popular one tends to become more popular because people don't want to learn/use multiple package manager. I actually used to use MacPorts before I switched to Homebrew just because it's been getting a lot more momentum / features / development and it's where every package is.

Others have offered solutions, but for future reference the actual Terminal commands that failed would be useful; "File not found" sounds like a path error, "Command not found" sounds fixable via Homebrew or Macports

TL;DR, about the section that states software from other UNIX-like OSes is hard to port to MacOS, how about homebrew and macports?

So many tools in this space! This one looks a little bit like go-task, but it seems maybe better for production workflows because if timeout support, while go-task seems more aimed to command line work/makefile replacement.

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https://github.com/go-task/task

View on GitHub

A similar tool is `task` https://taskfile.dev/ . It is quite capable and also a single executable. I've grown to quite like it.

check out tasks - a bit of a learning curve but arguably more powerful imo

That's when I came across taskfile.dev. Task is an automation tool designed to be more accessible than other options, such as GNU Make.

Full disclosure, I did not review Conda or Hatch fully. Not that there is anything explicitly wrong with either of them. Conda is too specific to the scientific community for my general taste. Hatch seems to go well with Conda and also uses the PyProject manifest as well. It's nice that it gives you several built in tools, similar to commit hooks, but I tend to like to roll my own via a Taskfile and run them with Poetry.

Taskfile is a tool for streamlining repetitive development tasks. It helps automate activities like building, testing, and deploying applications. Unlike Makefile, Taskfile uses YAML for configuration, making it more readable and user-friendly.

9. We test everything with another promotion which runs make targets which build docker containers to run python scripts (pytest)

This is also built by a complicated web of wildcarded makefile targets, which need to be interoperable and support a few if/else cases for specific components.

My plan is to migrate all of this to something simpler and more straightforward, or at least more maintainable, which is honestly probably going to turn into taskfile[0] instead of makefiles, and then simple python scripts for the glue that ties everything together or does more complex logic.

My hope is that it can be more straightforward and easier to maintain, with more component-ized logic, but realistically every step in that labyrinthine build process (and that's just the open-source version!) came from a decision made by a very talented team of engineers who know far more about the process and the product than I do. At this point I'm wondering if it would make 'more sense' to replace it with a giant python script of some kind and get access to all the logic we need all at once (it would not).

[0] https://taskfile.dev/

task - a task runner and a replacement for make