I'm already using Homebrew for a couple of things, Is it problematic to use Homebrew and MacPorts side by side?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 9, 2019, at 18:50, Andrew Udvare wrote:

> I can see one way: alias port or the Homebrew command to fix PATH to remove either because this is the main point of conflict. And you have to make sure you don't install other conflicting commands. So something that is installed with MacPorts may also need PATH to be fixed.

MacPorts ignores the PATH while building ports. Yet build problems can still appear if you have Homebrew (or Fink) installed to their default locations (or other software installed to a common location like /usr/local) while building something with MacPorts. This is because many software authors try to be "helpful" by making their build systems look in the default MacPorts, Homebrew, and/or Fink locations for the libraries they need, in who knows what order. When we find these we try to add a patch to remove this "helpfulness", but I'm sure we haven't found all of the cases where this happens.

We recommend you use one package manager only, and uninstall the others. If you want to use MacPorts primarily but there's one package in Homebrew that you need, why not contribute a Portfile of that software to MacPorts?

If you must use multiple package managers simultaneously, a probably relatively safe way to do so would be to install each with a nonstandard prefix. Of course, this has consequences. In MacPorts, for example, it means you can't use the MacPorts installer and must build MacPorts from source. It also means you can't use any of our precompiled binaries for ports, which means you must compile all ports from source, which is a pretty significant drawback. So please seriously consider just sticking with one package manager in its default location.