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Slant community chat on DiscoursePackage managers help install, update, remove and configure software packages.
A good Mac package manager should be easy to use, fast, reliably up to date, as unintrusive as possible, require as little dependencies as possible, and not require root privileges.
Pro Easy to setup and use
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
Pro Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Pro Unintrusive
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Con May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other t...
Pro Extends Homebrew
Homebrew Cask adds functionality to Homebrew such as allowing downloads of commercial licensed apps.
Pro Manage graphical applications through the command line
Homebrew Cask allows you to install graphical applications through the command line, rather than having to go through the standard installation process. E.g. brew cask install google-chrome
Con Duplicate apps found in brew may cause issue
There are warnings provided that apps found in brew should not be installed with brew cask (and vice versa). While the user is warned of this, mistakes can happen, which would be better to just see them avoided all together by not supplying duplicate apps.
Con Requires Xcode
Homebrew Cask requires that Xcode is installed, which may be more work than what some want to spend on configuring this app.
Pro You always and atomically get an isolated consistent profile
Every time you install, delete or change anything you get a new fresh copy of your user environment (set of symlinks to files in /nix/store) that's stored in the same /nix/store and handled mostly the same way. Your "profile" (symlink to one of environments) is updated after everythi...
Pro Can keep around several profiles for you to use
You can have different (probably overlapping) sets of software installed in two or more profiles that will be handled (changed, versioned, upgraded, reverted) independently. All software will be installed in the same /nix/store, so any overlaps between your sets will be physically installed only on...
Con Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions
While the functional approach that Nix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions. Especially in Debia...
Pro Binary installs
They are fast and reliable as they do not need to compile before installation.
Pro Allows for multiple environments
It is great for developers since you can easily switch between complete environments with different versions of packages, for testing and development.
Con Doesn't have everything
Conda is relatively new and has a smaller user-base, so the set of packages available is limited.
Con No way to resume downloads
Any download that is canceled or interrupted will have to be started over from the beginning as there is no built in solution for resuming downloads.
Pro pkgin is an apt-like tools for installing binaries from pkgsrc
pkgin aims to be a tool similar to apt/yum for managing pkgsrc binaries by relying on pkg_summary for installing, removing and upgrading packages and dependencies, using a remote repo.
Pro Works easily with Ansible
Can be used from within Ansible to install packages on macOS.
Con Relatively complicated setup and installation
Installing and setting pkgsrc up is a bit more complicated than in other package managers where it often consists in running a single script.
Pro Very easy and fast
Installing and removing packages is very easy, fast and painless thanks to using binary installs.
Pro Statically linked packages
Using statically liked packages allows each package to contain all of the dependencies it needs, this way the user just installs to then use the app. No muss no fuss.
Con Not many packages
Although Rudix is in development since 2005, there's a distinct lack of packages available. This limits the usefulness of the package manager for the user.
Con Not sandboxed
Binaries go directly to /usr/bin, so they are not sandboxed.
Pro Packages provided as binaries
Installed applications don't need to be compiled and built on the system.
Pro Will be familiar to apt-get users
Fink is based on apt-get making the transition to anyone used to Debian-based environments easier.
Con Pre-compiled packages are often out of date
It happens often that the user will come across out of date, pre-compiled packages. This can impede on using new features released in apps due to using older releases.
Pro Provides a consistent experience across OS X versions
MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own making sure that the experience is the same regardless of what OS X version is used.
Pro Nice variants system
MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.
Con Downloads unneeded libraries duplicating functionality already provided by Apple's libraries
As MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own a large duplication of functionality across MacPorts and Apple libraries can be found.
Con Bad at limiting dependencies
MacPorts has a habit of pulling very specific versions of dependencies for each package. It downloads different version of already existing dependencies even in cases where the existing dependency version would have worked seamlessly.
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