In article <WepMq.67154$u16.54...@newsfe15.iad>, K Richard Pixley <r...@noir.com> wrote: > On 1/2/12 13:03 , Benjamin Kaplan wrote: [...] > > Have you tried building through Macports? > No, I haven't. Macports scares me. When I tried them, or fink, in the > past, they rapidly polluted my boot disk and I didn't have any way to > unpollute it other than reloading from scratch. > > In freebsd, netbsd, or any of the linux distributions, I can trivially > create a virtual machine in about 20 minutes, screw with it as I like, > and toss it in seconds. In modern linux, I can create a root file > system with btrfs, snapshot, chroot to the snapshot and munge away. > When I'm done, I can just toss the snapshot. (Can do snapshots in > vmware too). > > If I screw up my boot drive in MacOsX, I'm in for hours of recovery time > reloading from Time Machine. While that's a lot better than it used to > be now that Time Machine is available, (reloading can now be done > largely unattended), it's not a price I'm willing to pay in order to > attempt to use Macports.
Whether you use a third-party package manager like MacPorts or Fink is a personal decision, of course, and there pros or cons for using either. But both MacPorts and Fink are specifically designed *not* to pollute your existing system. They both go to great lengths to install everything under their own unique directory subtrees, by default, /opt/local for MacPorts and /sw for Fink. I don't have much recent experience with Fink but I do with MacPorts. Other than a very few and documented exceptions, *everything* that MacPorts installs is under that /opt/local prefix and there are no conflicts with any Apple-installed files so it is really quite trivial to install and remove without fear of corrupting your base system. The whole process is documented here: http://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.macports.uninstalling.html -- Ned Deily, n...@acm.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
