MacPorts does also still drop to compiling from source more often than Homebrew. But that’s mostly because they take a more conservative legal approach towards the GPL—for instance, they won't distribute binaries of any GPL software that links with OpenSSL.
Also, ports for older/ancient versions of OS X are frequently source-only, but since Homebrew doesn’t support such systems at all, it's not really a fair comparison.
(As an aside, MacPorts must have the most incredible legacy support of any Mac project, ever. They had ARM working within a week of the M1’s release, largely because all of the infrastructure for multi-arch was already in place—to support users on PowerPC!)
> Also, ports for older/ancient versions of OS X are frequently source-only, but since Homebrew doesn’t support such systems at all, it's not really a fair point of comparison.
On an old, unsupported, system homebrew drops down to compiling. just the other day it compiled for four hours just to update one program. kinda infuriating really since there are downloads for those packages still.
We don’t support any scenario where things are built from source (i. e. we won’t help you if things break) so technically support has indeed been dropped.
Is there no way to enable downloads of builds in homebrew on those systems with the caveat that perhaps it'd have to go back to compiling if there aren't any?
Also, ports for older/ancient versions of OS X are frequently source-only, but since Homebrew doesn’t support such systems at all, it's not really a fair comparison.
(As an aside, MacPorts must have the most incredible legacy support of any Mac project, ever. They had ARM working within a week of the M1’s release, largely because all of the infrastructure for multi-arch was already in place—to support users on PowerPC!)