Messed up Perl

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 4, 2010, at 14:21, Hal Vaughan wrote:

> Wanting to use MacPorts does NOT mean I want to use it for EVERYTHING.  There's no need to user the MacPorts Perl, Python, or anything else that may already be installed on my iMac and is working fine.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That's one view, which is shared by some other package management systems, like, I believe, Fink and Homebrew. MacPorts, however, has taken the other view: that we will provide our own versions of (almost) all software, including software already provided by Mac OS X, and prefer to use it. This is explained in our FAQ:

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#syslibs

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#ownlibs

We do still rely on the system for some basic utilities, like bash, awk, bison, grep, sed, make and gcc. But even those are overridden by some ports where needed and use corresponding parts from MacPorts instead.