Why should I use macports?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 16, 2009, at 06:37, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

>> Broadly, because it's an easy-to-use library of useful free
>> software. It provides, especially, dependency tracking, which means
>> that when you install a package you want, you get the packages that
>> that that package depends on automatically, without fuss.
>
> I beg to differ. Over the years I have used macports I have certainly
> seen my share of fuss. [snip]
>
> If you had said a minimum of fuss, I would agree. It's almost
> impossible to avoid problems in a system that is dragging in source
> code from all over the intertubes the way macports does, and I must
> say I am impressed and pleased that I don't see more problems than I
> do. But let's not oversell it. "No fuss"? No way.

Agreed. But I'm going to continue using it, because it's quite a whole  
lot less fuss than trying to figure out on your own everything that  
MacPorts port maintainers have already figured out for you.


> The typical Mac user, whose idea of software
> installation involves dragging a .app to /Applications or double
> clicking a .mpkg, will however soon be out of their depths when a port
> command fails. And that will happen, if they use many ports and
> upgrade regularly.

Hopefully port commands won't fail very often, or when they do, the  
error messages they print will be sufficient for the user to figure  
out how to proceed. For the times when they aren't, I hope users will  
write to macports-users or file tickets so that we can help them.