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Comment by thedob | Hacker News Reader

But I bet many novice developers have been exposed to Ruby and Python (and SVN) because they shipped with OS X. Let's let newcomers use git without a custom install, and maybe it will lead to more widespread adoption.

You don't need the latest version of git for init, clone, add, commit, push, and pull to work.

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Even "novice developers" are able to:

  1. download macports
  2. double click an installer and click next a few times
  3. type 'sudo port install git-core'

Personally, I've had more trouble with macports than necessary. (Mostly because whenever I type 'port', I still get command not found.) It's much easier just to download the source, ./configure, make, and sudo make install.

Thats because macports installs itself to /opt/* which isn't in your $PATH. Easy to fix. But macports still causes more problems then its worth. So does fink for that matter.

What problems? Package dependency problems? The worse that I've had happen is having to deal with broken packages. The amount of times I haven't had to deal with figuring out dependencies makes it more then worthwhile, IMHO.

Inconsistent library versions when compiling programs. Hacks that can break very easily to detect system libraries.

How can you know how to do custom builds and not know how to fix your $PATH? ;)

  $ mate ~/.profile
  # add "/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:" to beginning of "export PATH"
  save

Now force a reload (eg. open a new terminal) and done ...

  wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.1.2.tar.gz
  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

Isn't much harder, either. I guess I forgot about

  tar xfz git<Tab>
  cd git<Tab>

Macports is better than nothing, but not by much. I admit it's a real blessing when it comes to something complex with a lot of dependencies - if it works, but a lot of the time it's more trouble than it's worth.

I've personally seen it delete the data during a postgres update, and it regularly runs roughshod over config files, etc. It screws up installs all the time, which can be a nasty surprise since it doesn't clean up after itself properly (this happened to me when it put a non-functioning ssh in my path, leading to a bit of panic when I suddenly needed it urgently). It can't clean up obsolete, well, anything without the "force" option, spewing spurious warnings all over the place .. except when it turns out they weren't spurious and you find out it deleted something critical. It's slow as hell to list what you do have installed. The maintainers are sloppy and non-working packages sit in the repos for weeks at a time (hello, Erlang).

Like I said, it's better than nothing, but I don't think anyone should use macports for anything that could conceivably store any data you care about. You will probably need to nuke /opt and re-build everything from scratch periodically, so make good and sure there's nothing in there that you care about. However, if you use it with caution and bear in mind the necessity of a periodic rebuild, it can be a big help.

I would vastly prefer a built-in package manager and fewer preinstalled packages.

No thanks, I want my skillset to be rare, not commoditized.

Please go work in some other industry.

Already am, Linux admin now. Coding jobs are hard to find yo'.

Which goes back to my point.

I can't code if everyone else is doing it in place of me. :P

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