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I still use macports, although it's mainly out of habit and I'll probably switch to brew on my next mac (I've also been trying out nix, and while I really like

I still use macports, although it's mainly out of habit and I'll probably switch to brew on my next mac (I've also been trying out nix, and while I really like the idea, package availability and freshness hasn't been as good as macports or brew. Nix hasn't picked up go 1.7, for example). My main concrete reason to prefer macports is that it has separate packages for every version of python so I can have them all installed at once for testing. I also like a lot of macports' technical decisions, like the fact that my regular user doesn't have write access to the installation directory. And macports has binary distributions now so the awful rebuild-the-world updates aren't as much of a problem anymore.

rubyn00bie 10y ago
> And macports has binary distributions now so the awful rebuild-the-world updates aren't as much of a problem anymore That's really awesome. > ... has separate packages for every version of python so I can have them all installed at once for testing Are the package versions themselves configured to be installed side by side? Or are you using multiple copies of macports[1]? [1] https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multiple https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multi...
- riffraff 10y ago
  they work side by side, you can just call "python27" vs "python34" and the same happens for related tools (pip, pep8 etc). The un-suffixed version ("python") refers to a default that can be switched with a single command affecting all related tools. It's great. This is not python specific either, it also works with perl, ruby, etc
  - asf8sdf8 10y ago
    now this is a pointless feature. time to get familiar with https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv
    - bdarnell 10y ago
      The fact that there is a super-specialized tool to do this demonstrates that it's not a pointless feature. It's much nicer to be able to use macports to install all the versions of python that I need instead of using brew to install pyenv and then pyenv to install python (and then pip to install python packages...)

rubyn00bie 10y ago

> And macports has binary distributions now so the awful rebuild-the-world updates aren't as much of a problem anymore That's really awesome. > ... has separate packages for every version of python so I can have them all installed at once for testing Are the package versions themselves configured to be installed side by side? Or are you using multiple copies of macports[1]? [1] https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multiple https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multi...

riffraff 10y ago
they work side by side, you can just call "python27" vs "python34" and the same happens for related tools (pip, pep8 etc). The un-suffixed version ("python") refers to a default that can be switched with a single command affecting all related tools. It's great. This is not python specific either, it also works with perl, ruby, etc
- asf8sdf8 10y ago
  now this is a pointless feature. time to get familiar with https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv
  - bdarnell 10y ago
    The fact that there is a super-specialized tool to do this demonstrates that it's not a pointless feature. It's much nicer to be able to use macports to install all the versions of python that I need instead of using brew to install pyenv and then pyenv to install python (and then pip to install python packages...)