Is Macports as good or as bad as I get the impression? [closed]
Among Linuxes, keeping up-to-date with MacPorts struck me as being most like Gentoo (arguably the least Mac-like entry on the shortlist of major Linux distributions). But after further experience it seems not to be exactly like Gentoo: with Gentoo, things break regularly, but you can often find a solution by Googling salient portions of an error message, and unlike computer situations in general it makes quite rational sense to try again 24 or 48 hours later if something is broken. MacPorts in this regard seems only like Gentoo in that you can get breakage by trying to keep your system up-to-date as intended.
Earlier breakage had me stumped about how to install Django; now I have Django installed, but its breaking on upgrading glib1; the last substantive change on the bug (http://trac.macports.org/ticket/21413) was about a year ago.
Is MacPorts really "Breaks like Gentoo but you can't fix it like Gentoo", or does it say "32 bit? Legacy! Ewww!" or something else? I'd like to know what a sane basic perspective is, and what I should and shouldn't expect of MacPorts. (Or if I've answered my own question in what I've said above.)
My personal opinion: MacPorts (as a project) has bitten off quite a lot more than it can chew. MacPorts seemingly tries to include absolutely everything from the Linux world, and unfortunately it ends up with countless packages that have no one looking after them to make sure that they actually work. Things break and stay broken, sometimes permanently.
Instead of wasting my time with MacPorts or Fink, I now consider the following three options when I want to run open-source software on a Mac:
- If there is a Mac-specific installer, I use it.
- If there is no installer but the project is known to work on Mac OS X, I build it from source. (This is every bit as easy as on a real Linux system, if you have Xcode installed.)
- If it is known not to work on Macs, or if there are too many strange dependencies, I run it in a real Linux virtual machine on my Mac.
MacPorts developers do their best to test on various systems and support multiple configurations. Usually there is support for the latest two releases of Mac OS X, at the moment this is 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. It even still works on 10.4 Tiger as a legacy platform, but no additional effort will be put into this to support new features.
For this, it is vitally important not to rely on the system version, but to install dependencies into the MacPorts prefix. This might result in larger lists of dependencies, but it is the best way to keep compatibility. Also, you get newer version than Apple might provide with their system, which is not updated often.
As a user you should always search and report your build problems in the issue tracker as otherwise the maintainer might not know they exist. Or you could submit patches, which make the integration process faster, or even take over maintainership for a few ports yourself. The MacPorts team is always in need of new maintainers contributing port updates or new ports. For your comparison, the number of developers is huge on Gentoo, where on MacPorts only a handful of people is actively working on the base and ports. Therefore it takes longer to isolate and fix issues. Remember all maintainers are contributing their time for free to the project.
For your problem in particular, did you check your build_arch setting in macports.conf as suggested in the comments of the ticket you linked? The default build_arch is x86_64 on Snow Leopard. Running a pure 32-bit MacPorts installation is possible, but is not supported. It is recommended to follow migration instructions into detail.
There will be software which is absolutely unable to compile for 64-bit (e.g. wine), but MacPorts will automatically rebuild dependencies with the +universal variant. This variant means there will be support for multiple architectures in a single binary or library.