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

[Rainer Müller]

On 2011-08-27 12:26 , Anders F Björklund wrote:
> 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.

/opt/macports would be the sanest choice today, but I guess it's way to
late to introduce such a change without breaking lots of documentation
and causing confusion.

> 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"...

/usr/local is in use by some third-party pkg installers. And most
software installs into /usr/local by default using the normal
./configure; make; make install approach. Unexperienced users often
don't know what they are doing when following tutorials found on the
net. Having other software install files into the MacPorts-managed
prefix would definitely cause problems.

Homebrew doesn't seem to care about dependencies and build correctness
as much as we do. I do not understand their choise of using /usr/local.
Making that writable for "staff" is just such a bad idea in terms of
system security...

Rainer