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Comment by thomnific | Hacker News Reader

I still use MacPorts and I am quite happy with it -- although I've tried to switch away a couple of times, I can't bring myself to uninstall a piece of software that's worked so reliably and faithfully for me over the years.

Maybe it's just that Homebrew turned me off right away. Back in the bad old days, when the Python 2/3 split was more serious than it is now, I had a heck of a time trying to get pandas and scipy running with Homebrew. I haven't given it a try lately so perhaps things are better now.

(I am probably also the kind of person where all the hectoring the Homebrew docs would do about installing to /usr/local eventually got on my nerves ... )

That being said, I don't use MacPorts versions of things like TeX or Ruby (I prefer MacTeX and plain old rvm).

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One of the best ways to run Python on OS X (other than conda) is pyenv -- which you can easily install via homebrew

I use macports but I am not happy about having to install full blown XCode in order to install macports in order to install (insert trivial, minor package here).

Has this changed ?

I am basing this on my experience of both Snow Leopard and Mavericks ... and in those cases, I had to download and install XCode. Further, this is (I suppose) more a criticism of OSX and how it does not include basic tools ...

I don't consider installing Xcode to be an unreasonable thing to do to - consider that 70+% of the people who buy a mac have no need for the compilers or system libraries. So it doesn't seem unreasonable to me - I mean, my debian box doesn't come with any of the devtools installed - and its a couple gigs of software to install.

10,5GB for latest Xcode which is kinda far from a trivial download size or space requirement.

xcode-select --install is more like 130mb, not 10gb.

http://osxdaily.com/2014/02/12/install-command-line-tools-ma...

> I don't consider installing Xcode to be an unreasonable thing to do to

Neither do I, but you can get away with just the command line tools. It's even on the install instructions.

I would put that number closer to 99.9%, if not 99.99%. :)

xcode-select --install on the CLI has been available since Mavericks (I think) and will install the CLI build tools without need to install the multi-gigabyte Xcode. I don't personally use macports, but that command should pretty much solve your issue.

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