This seems like more of a criticism for the python port maintainer than the entire build system. It might be worth posting a request for Tk support to be made a

This seems like more of a criticism for the python port maintainer than the entire build system. It might be worth posting a request for Tk support to be made a variant of each of the python ports. For the record, I use MacPorts over Homebrew for many of the reasons on this thread. I've been responding to people saying "What's the point?" because I see some of the benefits of Homebrew, even if I'm not fully convinced. (I suppose that I'm also frustrated at the common interwebs reaction of "But I use some other thing, so this new thing must suck." Homebrew may not be the answer to everything, but it's very worth looking at. There are some very good ideas there to some common problems.) Having said that, my complaint about Python was explicitly specific to that package. That's why I said "the Python issue to be a particular pain..." The Tk & Python issue has been brought up repeatedly on MacPorts lists and posts about MacPorts. They seem to prefer it that way, and for all I know, they have good overall reasons. Follow-up: Well, I haven't checked in a while, and I'm dead wrong. The getmail package currently depends on Python 2.6, which now does have a no-tkinter variant. Shows what I know. Edit: By the way, the PHP on OSX is notoriously light on modules. There have also been a few pretty ugly issues with Perl and core modules. So I'm not denying that there are real reasons to worry about the built-ins. I said as much in my post above. There are pros and cons to each approach.