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Misty De Meo edited this page Jan 8, 2016 · 4 revisions

I've been asked a few times "Why Tigerbrew instead of Macports?" Which is a great question! I think Macports is a great project and I have no ill-will towards them - for some people, Macports may well be the better solution, and I think that's okay.

However, Tigerbrew has several key advantages over Macports and I think you may find that they may help make up your mind. Tigerbrew also inherits all of Homebrew's advantages - so if you like Homebrew on newer machines, you'll love Tigerbrew!

We support PPC, we support Tiger and Leopard

Macports has historically had great support for PPC and older OSs, and it's built up a great set of supporting software and patches to fix these older platforms. However, support for PPC and older platforms is currently winding down in Macports. Maintainers no longer actively support users on these platforms. Users who come across any problems and who can't or don't want to patch them themselves are out of luck.

Tigerbrew, on the other hand, is built just for you if you're running PPC and/or an old OS. I promise to do whatever I can to help fix any problems you come across.

We support Leopard 64-bit systems (experimentally)

Neither Homebrew or Macports support running Leopard as a 64-bit system. Macports has a ppc64 mode, but it's unsupported and maintainers provide no support for users who try to use it.

Tigerbrew offers an experimental 64-bit Leopard mode that works on both Intel and PowerPC, and I've committed to fixing every 64-bit issue on Leopard that I can. If you want to try, just export this in your environment:

export HOMEBREW_PREFER_64_BIT=1