A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> Right now, we know that MacPorts works, when pulling in all these dependencies people in this thread are so keen to remove. We could spend a lot of effort changing a lot of ports to use system dependencies, and find that it doesn't work for a bunch of ports, and we've wasted a lot of time. Or we could find that it works fine on the particular system we're on, with the particular ports we tested, and commit it and think all is good, until the bug reports start rolling in, from users on Leopard or i386 or with Xcode 3 or whatever other non-majority configuration. And especially if we do it by "just" creating a switch (in the settings, or as a variant) as Jordan suggested, which is off by default, then an average of nobody will be using it, which means those few who do use it will likely find problems nobody else has seen, which will lead to conversations like this:
> 
> User: I set this new setting in macports.conf and now these ports won't install.
> 
> MacPorts team: Yes, changing that setting can break things; you shouldn't have set that.
> 
> User: Why did you give me an option that breaks things?

This sounds like the discussion about using /usr/local for prefix ?
(rather than the /opt/local, which everybody confuses with /opt ...)
It's even more fun, since it's in the default search paths and thus
will affect most things afterwards - even if you don't intend it to.

So that's another difference between the two: MacPorts now refuses to
run if you use --prefix=/usr/local (without --with-unsupported-prefix)
while Homebrew will install things* to /usr/local by default and even
encourages you to make it group-writable for the user group "staff"...

* actually it only installs symlinks to the Cellar there, but anyway.

Another interesting tidbit is that ${prefix}/bin comes before /usr/bin
(in the $PATH), but /usr/local/bin comes after /usr/bin (on BSD anyway).

But I dunno, I don't have any of them in my .profile, only "on demand".

--anders