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What do you want from an ‘official’ package manager?



For one, it would at least solve the issue of MacOS' coreutils being perpetually outdated. Secondly, it would be a nice way for developers to skip the burning dumpster fire otherwise known as the App Store when distributing basic apps, without having to download untrusted third-party software.

As for specific features, I'd really like to see a list of all the different MacOS components so I can remove the things I don't care about (iMessages, Photos, Facetime, etc.) like I can do on all my Linux boxes. It would be nice to have integration with MacOS' various distribution formats too, and while we're asking I'd love to see a declarative approach like NixOS, that would really put MacOS head-and-shoulders above your average Linux distro.


How would a official package manager solve packages being out of date? Apple has a means to deliver those updates already. If they had an interest in doing so, they'd update them. So it stands to reason it would be up to the community to deal with this, as it does now.


A real uninstall capability would be a basic starting point.


You aren’t the person I asked. From your previous comments, it’s obvious that you want MacOS to be more like Linux. I was curious if there are other reasons someone might have.


Annoint brew. It feels like a total hack that you need an open source project which gets meagre funding (I tishinkbthey donate some hardware) is the only way to get a >2k machine to be useful for development.


Not the person above, but I just want it to be official/blessed. Same as with winget vs chocolatey. Same as with netflix vs torrents. I want one and only one main place to look. The other options might be "better" in some aspect, but being standard/official/"the one" is a huge benefit.

Every other OS, be it windows, android, ios, linux, *bsd,... has a package manager included. Mac is the only hold out.




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