Mixing brew and macports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 7, 2022, at 03:20, Christoph Kukulies wrote:

> I’m not sure whether I can harmlessly use brew to install a package that is not available under macports, to be precise, sigrok/pulseview is the target.
> 
> All available remedies refer to using brew install.
> 
> May I use brew along with macports, the latter being my tool of choice for maintaining external software packages for macOS?

It is recommended to use one package manager only and uninstall any other package managers and anything you have installed with them. You may run into conflicts if you use multiple package managers on the same machine, and if you report such problems, our likely first response will be to advise you to uninstall the other ones.

On Intel systems, Homebrew installs into /usr/local, which is particularly problematic:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#usrlocal

but just because they have changed it to /opt/homebrew on Apple Silicon systems that doesn't completely solve the problems. Developers of various packages have a habit of trying to be helpful by adding well-known prefixes like those of Homebrew and MacPorts to their build systems, which is great for users installing those packages standalone but terrible for when we want to add those packages to those package managers themselves.

If there is software you want that is not in MacPorts, please add it and send us a pull request, or file a ticket requesting someone else add it.