Choosing a Package Manager for macOS
This is an adjunct to my guide for building OpenWRT natively on Mac OS X; my criteria for choosing which management system to install is based solely on it's inclusion of and ability to build the necessary packages to do so.
That said, we are only provided with three mature and capable third-party systems:
All three are currently under active development. Fink and Macports have extensive repositories that are well
suited for this task. Despite the elegance espoused by Homebrew developers, it's limited application and
library catalog does not meet our needs. That leaves us with Fink and Macports.
I've used Fink since 2006, when transitioning from a PC/Gnu system to an Intel Mac. It's based on Debian's dpkg and
apt package management system, so I felt right at home.
Macports is based on the FreeBSD ports system, the same project OS X was derived from. Macports provides 'variants'
options for a number of it's packages that allow certain options for features and libraries to be enabled during
compilation.
The deciding factor here is simply that Fink's repositories have out of date binaries, and building everything from
source via Fink isn't very stable. Macports, on the other hand, has repositories with up-to-date binaries as a
secondary option to building packages from source. Both intended to accomplish the same goal through different
mechanisms, but ended up filling each other's niche better than the original.
