going /usr/local
I’ve been living a double life with my Mac OS X development environment, the MacPorts life and the /usr/local life.
Why I used MacPorts?
- It’s easy, just type
sudo port install packagename
However, I kept running into more and more situations where MacPorts didn’t really work for me.
- MacPorts seemed to always be behind in revisions. I wanted to use the lastest and greatest.
- MacPorts sometimes failed, and I had to search around for the solution providing special switches. How is this any different than installing from source?
Lately, I started seeing conflicts between /opt/local (MacPorts) and /usr/local. This is when I decided I needed to make a choice between them. I decided to adopted the /usr/local method, since I want to be able to use the latest versions for libraries and software. When I was looking around for posts on the subject, I happened to stumble upon this nice post on why you would want to install your own packages in /usr/local. Justification!
So, today I am starting on that path. I am not sure if it will be successful, but I am giving it a try.
August 8th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] a conflict. I had just installed that the other day, when I decided to abandoned macports and go /usr/local. I just removed this installation, by going to the source directory (which I still had around) and [...]