On Oct 16, 2009, at 06:37, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:
Broadly, because it's an easy-to-use library of useful free
software. It provides, especially, dependency tracking, which means
that when you install a package you want, you get the packages that
that that package depends on automatically, without fuss.
I beg to differ. Over the years I have used macports I have certainly
seen my share of fuss. [snip]
If you had said a minimum of fuss, I would agree. It's almost
impossible to avoid problems in a system that is dragging in source
code from all over the intertubes the way macports does, and I must
say I am impressed and pleased that I don't see more problems than I
do. But let's not oversell it. "No fuss"? No way.
Agreed. But I'm going to continue using it, because it's quite a whole
lot less fuss than trying to figure out on your own everything that
MacPorts port maintainers have already figured out for you.
The typical Mac user, whose idea of software
installation involves dragging a .app to /Applications or double
clicking a .mpkg, will however soon be out of their depths when a port
command fails. And that will happen, if they use many ports and
upgrade regularly.
Hopefully port commands won't fail very often, or when they do, the
error messages they print will be sufficient for the user to figure
out how to proceed. For the times when they aren't, I hope users will
write to macports-users or file tickets so that we can help them.
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