Co-existance of MacPorts and Brew?

[Bill Cole]

On 2023-02-15 at 14:54:40 UTC-0500 (Wed, 15 Feb 2023 14:54:40 -0500)
André-John Mas <andrejohn.mas at gmail.com>
is rumored to have said:

> Hiya,
>
> What is the current status of co-existence of Brew and MacPorts on the 
> same machine?
> Previously this was meant to be a problem.

It remains problematic. The conflict is intrinsic, and cannot be solved 
completely without one of the projects adopting the policies and 
practices of the other in a fundamentally incompatible way.

With that baseline understanding, you can use both never (if you are 
careful and lucky,) have a problem.


> I am asking this question, since I am finding more and more recipes 
> pointing towards
> using Brew, instead of MacPorts.

If you try to use both it will *mostly* work and you may never encounter 
a problem, but if you do run into a conflict, it could be very hard to 
find a solution.

The underlying problem is that many open source packages have /usr/local 
hardcoded into their build, install, or load, such that even if they are 
made to live in and use the world under /opt/local (i.e. MacPorts) they 
may still look for shared libraries under /usr/local first. If you have 
a Brew world under /usr/local, there's a significant chance that if you 
build MacPorts packages from source, some configure script will pick 
stuff in /usr/local/ to use instead of the /opt/local components. That 
may work, until the next upgrade of the relevant packages on one side or 
the other.

> The latest one I ran into was Vagrant, which indicates how to use Brew 
> to install, but
> nothing for MacPorts:
>
> https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/downloads
>
> Also, there doesn't seem to a version of Vagrant in MacPorts.

If there's a recipe for brew, it shouldn't be terribly hard to create a 
port for MacPorts. All it takes is someone willing and able to do the 
work of creating the portfile and porting patches as needed.

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire