When I moved from Linux to Mac (started iOS development and got sick of tinkering to get stuff working), I looked at both homebrew and macports. As soon as I s

When I moved from Linux to Mac (started iOS development and got sick of tinkering to get stuff working), I looked at both homebrew and macports. As soon as I saw that homebrew wanted to use /usr/local instead of /opt, I avoided it. These days, /usr is part of the system, even though GNU still uses /usr/local as the default. /opt matches where the LSB says "3rd party packages" should be installed, MacPorts is (or was) partly sponsored (and thus "blessed") by Apple and it matches the "port" packager that is used for FreeBSD. Yes you have to do some PATH and LDPATH tricks to make sure that /opt/local/* is at the top of your paths, but other than that, MacPorts has been painless. There are some steps to follow when a new version of Xcode (and effectively a major release of MacOS) comes out, but that's more about getting xcode to accept you've accepted Apple's license.