Goodbye Mac OS Forge, hello GitHub

&gt; Over the years, several developers have asked why we&#x27;re not on GitHub. The perception is that &quot;everybody&quot; is on GitHub, and some developers don&#x27;t take your project seriously if it&#x27;s not on GitHub.<p>This is the sad truth. It doesn&#x27;t matter anymore if Bitbucket&#x2F;Gitlab&#x2F;etc. are better than GitHub: The social pressure for open source projects to move to GitHub is so high that the alternatives don&#x27;t even stand a chance.<p>Maybe a meta-search engine for open source projects could help the competition, but if all projects are on GitHub, who would use such a search engine?<p>P.S.: I actually like GitHub, I&#x27;m just sad that all cool changes that GitLab has made recently will end up being mostly ignored by the OSS community. Even if they fixed their speed problem (which I think is their biggest downside compared to GitHub), no project would move there because &quot;everybody is on GitHub&quot;.

With all of the - I&#x27;d call them shenanigans, but I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re justifiable features [0] to someone - with homebrew, it may be time to take a closer look at macports as a replacement. Glad to see the project not only alive, but evolving with the community.<p>[0] Like automatically running `brew update` with every brew command run. I was literally wondering if my computer had frozen up again when I saw that it had done a full update (which involves not only patching the brew code, but updating its source repos) before installing a pre-compiled version of tmux.

I am sincerely curious when I ask this, please don&#x27;t see it as flame bait-- what&#x2F;who uses Macports still instead of Homebrew (or Nix)?<p>Is it for legacy systems? Or unusual requirements? Habit?<p>Edit for reasoning: I&#x27;m curious because who knows-- maybe I&#x27;m missing something really cool or jumped ship to Homebrew years ago too hastily?<p>Edit #2: Just wanted to say thanks to the folks who have replied below! I&#x27;m definitely a bit more curious about macports again.

The problems addressed by Homebrew, Macports and the like have all been solved in a cross-platform manner by the fine folks working on pkgsrc.<p>Sane defaults, respect for system security settings, and a general lack of bullshit. As a *BSD refugee on Mac OS X, it feels like a slice of home every time I need to install software.

I&#x27;ve been using macports for years and am excited by the prospects a &quot;social&quot; coding experience will bring with a much lower barrier to entry for contributions.<p>They say they will stick with Trac for dealing with issues. I understand that for managing the ports collection, but are they planning on keeping &quot;base&quot; issues (i.e. the application code) off the github as well?<p>I don&#x27;t know how well different repos and issue trackers interop, but it seems like an open-source solution like gitlab would offer the (potential for) customization&#x2F;integration more readily than github.<p>I&#x27;m sure they just desire a turn-key solution and don&#x27;t want to manage a whole new project, but maybe, one day, they&#x27;ll want to unify the experience again.

For anyone using homebrew or other package manager, and who has an afternoon free; I&#x27;d suggest checking Nix out. It&#x27;s very nice to define an immutable manifest and have your system derived from it. If you love pure functions, you&#x27;ll love Nix.

I never get the logic of how whole heartedly opensource projects embrace a completely closed source software. I get it that not everything can be open source but there are already good open source alternatives for hosting.

I hope this helps with the adoption of newer versions of packages. I have used MacPorts in the past (and Fink before) but I am supper happy with Homebrew these days. What I disliked about Macports was:<p>1. Ports define which compiler to use. Sometimes I had to install a small tool and first it would another version of gcc. 2. Ports were outdated a lot. I developed a project using the Grails-framework and it was a couple of versions behind the current stable release. Just checked: Grails port is at version 2.2 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trac.macports.org&#x2F;browser&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;dports&#x2F;devel&#x2F;grails&#x2F;Portfile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trac.macports.org&#x2F;browser&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;dports&#x2F;devel&#x2F;grails&#x2F;...</a> while the current version being 3.1.10<p>With Homebrew the adoption rate seems much higher. Also you don&#x27;t depend on a single maintainer.

Wait, why does <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macosforge.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macosforge.org&#x2F;</a> have a cert that says Apple, Inc. Is Macports funded and managed by Apple?

This seems to have coincided with a practical cause to look for a new place:<p><pre><code> But now that we have to leave Mac OS Forge anyway, it makes sense to convert to git and take the opportunity to do some much needed and overdue restructuring[...]</code></pre>

This is long overdue. Google slowly been doing the same with moving from Google Code (which was supposed to be dead? It is though?) to GitHub, but a little progression is better than no progression.

It&#x27;s probably been stated a million times before but it&#x27;s hard to remember what coding was like before github. CVS and subversion - what&#x27;s that? Github is so pervasive that when a project uses another git code sharing site you just get annoyed. Github Issues may suck, but it&#x27;s so darn convenient and so well integrated. It&#x27;s far worse when a project uses another ticket tracking system and just uses github for pull requests. Just give in to our new code overlords and go with the flow.

Or you can run the Windows Subsystem for Linux and have real apt-get or yum!

Good for you guys! Lol wtf is Forge?