Apple - What are pros and cons for MacPorts, Fink and Homebrew?

Definitely Homebrew. I started with Fink, then switched to MacPorts (happier), then Homebrew (much, much happier). These are my reasons for using each (a pro list if you will):

Fink

• Apt-based - feel right at home if you come from a Debian-based environment
• Binary packages - packages are available as binaries so no long compile times. Practically though I've found that the pre-compiled binaries were always outdated and I had to compile stuff for my system anyways

MacPorts

• Unlike homebrew do not depend on MacOS library that may change in the future.
• Install everything in /opt/local
• Nice variants system that lets you customise the build
• Easy and intuitive port files, also allows you to add your own
• supports many versions of OSX and macos going back to Tiger including PowerPC versions see other answer

Homebrew

• Maximum leveraging of what comes with OS X. Unlike Fink or MacPorts, it does not require you to build/install ruby and libraries from scratch just to install some small Ruby-based tool.
• Installs into /usr/local
• Install without root access
• Every installed package is cleanly sandboxed into its own cellar so you don't have stray files all over your system, just symlinks from bin, man, etc.
• Has guides and automation to create your own formula files (ie. package descriptors)
• Written in ruby and all formulas are concise ruby scripts
• Faster installs because of Pre-compiled binaries

pkgin

• Faster installs because of Pre-compiled binaries
• Everything installed in /opt/pkg/
• backed by pkgsrc community and Joyent
• Known to work on NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Debian, Mac OS X, Minix

https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/

http://pkgin.net/

MacPorts

It is more independent of Mac OS X, this means MacPorts will just ignore many of the system libraries and softwares that already available in Mac OS X and pull its own one instead, which could be slower when the utility you install requires some set of large libraries and softwares.

But this kind of choice is safer because the packages you installed are less influenced by Apple's system update/upgrade procedure.

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Homebrew

It is more dependent on existing Mac OS X installed packages, so this will speed up the installation of packages and minimize redundant libraries.

But the risk is installed packages might be broken because of Apple's system update/upgrade.

So, these are the two different kind of tradeoff.

Also, Homebrew takes over /usr/local by default, with which some folks don't like this because it somehow conflict with the unix-tradition and might cause problems if you’ve already installed anything there (MySQL, etc.)

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Apart from these differences, considering the packages these two can offer, you can check with these two commands if you already have MacPorts/Homebrew installed, which show you the packages they currently provided:

port list | wc -l
brew search | wc -l

And you will find out that MacPorts has many more packages than Homebrew.

(19399 v.s 3583 on May 13 2016)

Just to add some of my own thoughts that seem true-ish circa late 2014 at least.

Homebrew, as of a couple of years ago, definitely has the upper hand in terms of mindshare. You'll find a lot of blogs with people talking about how much happier they are with Homebrew - usually because of the whole "MacPorts pulls in the whole world" vs "Homebrew makes use of what you already have" thing.

However, IMO, MacPorts is a different beast now than it was a couple of years ago. When I first switched to OS X & was using MacPorts the MP philosophy was indeed frustrating because almost everything was built from source. A new installation was particularly painful/slow. However over the past year or so, based purely on my own impressions, it seems like 90% of MP packages are binaries & so installation is actually really fast now. From what I gather Homebrew is also moving in this direction with "Bottles" but i get the impression that most things you install via HB at this point in time will be compiled from source.

So, if only to offer a countervailing opinion, MacPorts seems to actually be the "faster " option these days. However most peoples opinions of MP seem to be based on experiences from circa 2011-12 or so & dont really take this into account. Take this with a grain of salt though as I'm not a regular HB user (and its rather painful to use both side by side).

I do think HB has advantages that mean it will probably "win the war" in the long run though

• HB is all Ruby whereas MacPorts, and its package formulae, are written in TCL which is....not exactly a popular scripting language. That said its pretty damn simple to create your own portfile.
• HB is based around GitHub & thus seems a lot more welcoming to new contributors whereas MacPorts hosts its own SVN repository somewhere I think - which basically reflects the different ages of both projects I suppose.
• As mentioned the general consensus is that MacPorts has been superseded by HB &, rightly or wrongly, that draws more people towards it.

Otherwise YaOZl & kLy covered the main difference in terms of sudo, dependencies etc pretty well. Personally I do find that MacPorts sometimes leads to some headaches in terms of other programs not expecting anything to be in /opt/local, things being installed with root permissions etc & there are some things that are generally best not installed with MacPorts (e.g. you can install Rails via MacPorts but you'd be crazy not to install it via Ruby's normal Gem management). Other than that though I'm a big fan of the MacPorts philosophy of building its own little world & not relying on some prepackaged OS X library - when it works, and it mostly does, everything is dead simple. Which is what you want of a Package Manager really. And as i mentioned, at this point in time its pretty damn quick to set most things up.

Hope some of that was useful.