Dear Matt,
I’m the official MacPorts maintainer for Demeter. I am an amateur at this (i.e., at Ports), but I do have notes somewhere on how to update the port file (and, indeed, where to find it in the first place!).
Concerning the long list of dependencies: I was unaware of the size of this list. I agree. It sounds crazy to think that we need THREE non-clang compilers to build demeter. I know the fellow who was the previous maintainer, and he has a bit of a superstitious belief in the powers of gcc. Perhaps he imposed this belief unnecessarily on us all?
It sounds to me like you understand the internals of what demeter uses and how, much much better than I do. Let me suggest that you either contact me privately OR file a trac ticket at MacPorts about this. Either way, include details of what you think plausibly might be false dependencies. Of course, we’ll also want to add the new Perl dependencies that you pointed out. Perhaps then I can patch the port file and get your assistance in testing it in some way? Once we have a patch we like, I don’t have the powers to commit it to the MacPorts repository directly, but I can certainly make a request for a commit (they are pretty fast and responsive about that).
I’d like to comment also on the time it takes to install MacPorts. The whole MacPorts concept supports installing from source AND installing pre-built binaries. The catch (as I understand it) is that the server resources that they use to build and serve the binaries are donated by a large corporation (one with a strong interest in selling more Macintosh computers, naturally). Thus the open-source Ports team cannot simply make the binary “buildbots” appear at will. An early adopter of an OS X version has to install every port, even the incredibly complex ones, from source. Again, I could be wrong, but I think that El Capitan is still in this state. See https://trac.macports.org/ticket/48609 and http://macports-dev.macosforge.narkive.com/tRq2luOR/el-capitan-buildbot for some additional info.
Now, this is not to say that Homebrew is a worse solution than MacPorts. I have no basis for comparison (though here is one clue: many packages that I use within the Julia language depend on Homebrew for further dependencies, and I have noticed that they manage to Just Work). But I did want to defend MacPorts from the implied charge that it will always take all users ten hours to install a working system. If you can find a Homebrew expert to work with and develop a Demeter solution, that’s great. Here in my group at NIST, we use MacPorts for so many things that I’m sure we’ll continue to maintain the port file for the foreseeable future.
Best wishes,
Joe Fowler
On Nov 13, 2015, at 11:00 AM,