Just curious, what's wrong with Homebrew? I'm just a student, not a full-time developer, but I've never had problems with it and find it pretty pleasant to use.
I use a macbook for the battery life and the no-hassle experience (which is getting worse everyday, but that's a different discussion). Homebrew works against these two principles in multiple ways. Compiling software takes massive amounts of time; if I need to install something I want it now, dammit. In principle, there are some binary packages too, but when I tried homebrew there were not for anything that I needed.
Apart from time, compiling software consumes energy, decreasing the autonomy of my laptop.
But those are not the main reasons I dislike homebrew so much. My main gripe is that the packages are of extremely poor quality. When I needed something, it was not compiled with the options I needed. E.g. packages were missing DTrace integration, QEMU was missing the one target I cared about etc.
I am a Go developer; you have no idea how many problems people have had with the homebrew package. It is garbage. And Go is quite trivial to package compared to other stuff. I simply gave up on helping anyone reporting a problem if he is using homebrew. I ask them to recompile Go from official source first.
And then there's the whole curl into bash things, gah I'll just stop now.
The biggest advantage of pkgsrc (apart from quality binary packages) is that I can use the same package versions, compiled exactly the same (to the extent possible) on OS X, Linux, and Solaris; and these are production-ready releases used in production by Joyent (and others) vetted by actual release engineers.
And with pkgsrc it is trivial to install from source when you need to modify a package locally (unlike, say, with apt).
It's slow and it has to build the packages most of the time. pkgin will install a precompiled packages very quickly. It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.
> It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.
And that's a problem?
I would argue that it's a feature. Due to Homebrew being written in Ruby, it has easily allowed over 4,000 contributors [1]. Recipes are easy to read and inspect for verification purposes.
So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs is somehow better than a collection of scripts that lets you build from source? I don't think so... As an update is something that is done occasionally and in the background "slow" is not exactly a reason to change.
It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.