Editing Software Development Platforms (section)

==MacPorts==

Macports is a package management tool for OS-X.  It will automatically resolve dependencies, down source code, apply patches, and compile.

This sounds wonderful, however it has some drawbacks.  For one, you don't have any choice in version of the software installed, and sometimes the available ports are somewhat outdated.  Also, it tends to pull in more dependencies than are strictly required, and to duplicate unnecessarily many OS-X system files.

I therefore tend to use macports only for very simple software, or for software that would otherwise be quite difficult to install.

I recommend not installing macports at all if you can avoid it without too much trouble.

===Installation===

See http://www.macports.org/ .

===Configuring Macports===

I like to add this line to /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf:

 +no_x11 +quartz

This way, x11 functionality won't be built where possible.  These can lead to a huge reduction in the number of required dependencies.

macports by default uses single-process building.  Since many ports take a long time to compile, it is useful to speed things up by enabling multi-process building.  Do to this, edit /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf and set <tt>buildmakejobs</tt> to 0.  This will cause it to use a number of build jobs equal to the number of processors in the system.