Packages apt-get vs brew?

Question

Im trying to get something running in a lab, and I need to install a whole bunch of packages to compile the code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev libwx-perl libmodule-build-perl git cpanminus libextutils-cppguess-perl libboost-all-dev libxmu-dev liblocal-lib-perl wx-common libopengl-perl libwx-glcanvas-perl libtbb-dev libxmu-dev freeglut3-dev libwxgtk-media3.0-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libextutils-makemaker-cpanfile-perl

The problem is, I'm working on a Mac; So I only have brew available - and the package names are not equivalent.

Am I trying to do something dumb and impossible, or is there a way to cross reference those apt-get packages to ones available in brew and install those so I can build the app?

For added context, its a modified "slicer" application for generating files that a 3d printer uses to make parts. I could fire up an ubuntu VM and use apt-get, but I'm on an M1 mac at the moment and recompiling experimental QEMU code just so I can fire up an ubuntu VM takes me way more out of my depth than I already am... I'm running brew on a duplicated, rosetta emulation forced terminal.

Answer 1

There is no straightforward way to automatically figure out whether a corresponding Homebrew package exists for each of these packages, no. But you can probably guess the majority, and manually figure out the rest. Each Debian package has a link to the upstream sources, and a home page if one exists, from which you can often find links to packages for other architectures, etc.

From the Debian package search page you can search eg for the libxmu-dev package , and discover the corresponding package page for Buster (the current stable Debian release) , which in turn has links to the upstream repo, etc. But this is an X11 package, so it's not straightforwardly compatible with macOS, which uses an entirely different GUI architecture.