homebrew, a macports replacement (0)

copied from my sent mail about 16 days ago.

date: 2010-06-01 18:34
subject: homebrew, a macports replacement

Now I think I've setup almost every development tools
on my new macbook pro via homebrew. The problem of
macports is that compiling is not always a good idea,
and if you just want to upgrade a package, sometimes
there will be tons of dependencies need to be upgraded
as well... It's a bit annoying, especially if compiling takes
so long. (for example, gcc may need 4 hours to be compiled)
And I have no idea why on earth upgrading git-core needs
to upgrade mysql as well. The system was a bit too complex.

On the other hand, homebrew[0] is a lot more lightweight.
You still need to compile sometimes, but if there's
official binary distribution, homebrew will use that,
save you a lot of time if you just want to use it.

The basic architecture of homebrew is that it installs
everything under /usr/local by default, and requires you
to enter password to do sudo at the beginning,
then later it chown everything to your user account.
So you will not need to use sudo to install anything lately.

This is a very good practice in my opinion,
that the lesser sudo the more secure[1]. I always
install all my ruby gems in user's home, that way
I don't need to use sudo. To do so, run following script:
$ echo 'gem: --user --no-ri --no-rdoc' >> ~/.gemrc

[0] http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
[1] http://xkcd.com/149/