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

[Anders F Björklund]

Rainer Müller wrote:

> 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.

I'd go with /opt/ports, to avoid having to do another rename...
(remembering dports to mports, and since it's "OS X Lion" now)
But like you say, it's not only late but also kinda pointless ?

>> 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.

Right, but if you want to reuse as much of the system as possible
it makes sense to even reuse things that the user has installed...
Some examples being Python.org, or similar "vendor" installations.

> 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...

Well, everybody is an admin anyway right ? (another bad default)
But see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=484841
And you don't *have* to use /usr/local, you can use ~/homebrew.

But using /usr/local is very "simple", because you don't have to
change PATH and don't have to add any -I CPPFLAGS or -L LDFLAGS ?
"One of the reasons Homebrew just works relative to the competition"

--anders