MacPorts and Homebrew

[Brandon Allbery]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 11:30 PM, Mark Lentczner <mark.lentczner at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A known pitfall for all is that the OS X native installer package, and
> MacPorts build with different install paths, and different library
> assumptions. I don't know if Homebrew does it yet differently or is the
> same as MacPorts.
>

That's the least of the issues. MacPorts and Homebrew, for compatibility
with the largely Linux-based packages they distribute, use GNU versions of
libiconv and libreadline instead of Apple's BSD-sourced libraries (Apple's
libreadline is BSD's libedit); since Apple named their libraries the same
as the GNU ones, this leads to severe incompatibilities. It's definitely
noticeable with ghc and Haskell libraries because libiconv is used by ghc
for locale support. You simply cannot mix libraries between any of the
three, or Fink or any other third party packagers. (Homebrew used to allow
it, before discovering the insane compatibility and support issues caused
by Apple's handling of libiconv and libreadline. They have adopted the same
stance as MacPorts since then.)

For paths, the upstream ghc package uses /usr/bin and /usr/lib; MacPorts
uses /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/lib; Homebrew uses /usr/local/bin and
/usr/local/lib. Not that this is enormously relevant (or, to the extent
that it is, it's a slight amelioration) because of the above library
incompatibilities.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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