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I've always used brew, but sometime in the last few of years (Mojave?) I was plagued with these problems when installing different versions of Python simultaneo

I've always used brew, but sometime in the last few of years (Mojave?) I was plagued with these problems when installing different versions of Python simultaneously. Either brew broke Python installs, broke things like asdf, couldn't build Python from scratch, virtualenvs broke. Hair-pulling stuff. I decided to use MacPorts just for Python and switching Python versions worked perfectly. Eventually I migrated most of the brew stuff to MacPorts. I'm not saying one is superior to another, it's just that in my very personal experience and uses, I don't find anything in brew that MacPorts doesn't give me.

b3morales 4y ago
It's been a while since I've looked into it, but last I knew MacPorts was much more aggressive than brew about just not sharing dependencies between packages, to avoid this kind of thing. In effect, trading disk space against fragility.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
asdf has been nice for managing programming language versions
rcarmo 4y ago
I use brew with pyenv and never looked back.
chrisfinazzo 4y ago
Like rcarmo, I looked at pyenv as it shared (Read: copied wholesale for obvious reasons) many of the ideas in rbenv which has been excellent for dealing with different versions of Ruby. Either I just couldn't get used to it or the similarities are not as clear as they might appear to be at first glance because I eventually gave up and backed off Python entirely until miniconda was available via brew and BBEdit gained the ability to switch environments without jumping through hoops. That said, I am currently trying to remove Python from brew entirely and put everything into conda - for a few upgrades now, brew has complained loudly during upgrades that compiling from source isn't supported and may break things. I can run `brew uses $FORMULA` to find the things that depend on Python that brew knows about - is it generally safe to move these into conda's "base" environment? The main thing that I use conda for (The Standard Ebooks project) has an environment and version of Py all to itself.

b3morales 4y ago

It's been a while since I've looked into it, but last I knew MacPorts was much more aggressive than brew about just not sharing dependencies between packages, to avoid this kind of thing. In effect, trading disk space against fragility.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

asdf has been nice for managing programming language versions

rcarmo 4y ago

I use brew with pyenv and never looked back.

chrisfinazzo 4y ago

Like rcarmo, I looked at pyenv as it shared (Read: copied wholesale for obvious reasons) many of the ideas in rbenv which has been excellent for dealing with different versions of Ruby. Either I just couldn't get used to it or the similarities are not as clear as they might appear to be at first glance because I eventually gave up and backed off Python entirely until miniconda was available via brew and BBEdit gained the ability to switch environments without jumping through hoops. That said, I am currently trying to remove Python from brew entirely and put everything into conda - for a few upgrades now, brew has complained loudly during upgrades that compiling from source isn't supported and may break things. I can run `brew uses $FORMULA` to find the things that depend on Python that brew knows about - is it generally safe to move these into conda's "base" environment? The main thing that I use conda for (The Standard Ebooks project) has an environment and version of Py all to itself.