homebrew and macports together?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Rainer M Krug wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am using homebrew at the moment, but there are certain packges, which
> are not on homebrew (e.g. awesome and kde apps).
>
> Therefore I am thinking abiout using these two package managers in
> parallel.
>
> I know this *can* cause problems, but is it likely to cause problems?
> What do I have to be aware about? Any experiences?

If you need those packages only occasionally, you could create a
shortcut to switch the PATH settings. Often the most problems can be
prevented by including just MacPorts or just Homebrew into PATH and
leaving the other one out.

The most problematic part is probably if you have Homebrew in PATH
before MacPorts and you try to install a MacPorts package from source
(or vice versa).

Apart from that my personal opinion is "just try". Some software is
written in such a way that it explicitly looks for libraries in "/sw"
or "/opt/local" to be more "user-friendly" and account for the fact
that users might have dependencies in Fink, Macports, ... It could
happen that a package that you try to install with Homebrew would
accidentally pick up its dependency from MacPorts. All these are bugs
that can/should be reported and fixed, it's just that you never know
in advance and developers rarely test such configurations.

Mojca