FAQ

Why do you “make install” rather than “make” and then “make install” separately?

It saves time, eg. Qt is about 40 seconds faster to build without the separate steps. However some projects won’t build this way because their Makefile dependencies aren’t set right, so beware!

Why does Homebrew download with CURL rather than with Ruby’s HTTP lib?

CURL supports an ungodly number of transfer protocols which makes it more useful. It also has been proven by time to be stable and reliable.

Macports sucks because it takes so long to compile everything, why are you doing that?

Well, because we don’t duplicate all the stuff that OS X already installs (eg openssl, libz, libxml), generally you will compile an awful lot less stuff with Homebrew. So then it just becomes convenient because you can decide how the software builds. Open Source software is meant to be built from source, it comes with all sorts of options. Binary packages take away your choices.

How about Gentoo Prefix?

Gentoo Prefix seems pretty cool, but it isn’t optimised specfically for Mac users and it duplicates worse than MacPorts, including gcc and all that jazz. Otherwise I’d use it.