MacPorts - 1.7.1

I believe that the last few comments are unfair. Although it is true that dependency problems exist for some ports and that the project is not as mature and reliable as, say, Debian's aptitude or maybe even Fink, it is an invaluable tool in many circumstances, especially for developers. It nearly always has up-to-date versions of its ports, whereas Fink (at least in the past – cannot judge because I do not use it now) had obsolete versions of many packages. It has packages that you would not find anywhere else (not even in Fink) and you would have to compile yourself if needed. The fact that it does not link to OS X's libraries but it needs to install its own has proved to be a plus, not a drawback, in my past experience: I can install the most recent releases of Boost libraries, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Apache, etc… without touching OS X. Even better, I can make MacPorts's versions coexist with OS X's ones. MacPorts, in my opinion, is the way to go for MySQL and PostgreSQL: all the other distributions I've seen lack some libraries or scatter things in folders like Library, Framework, etc… making it difficult sometimes to undo an installation. With MacPorts, with a simple command I'm done with all I need (including a launchd item to start and stop the server). And I *know* where all the files are. Finally, if I screw up MacPorts, as a last resort I may simply trash its folder and reinstall (never needed to to do that in the last two years). The few times I have had problems installing a package, a Google search has solved my problem.

Overall, MacPorts is not "to be avoided", it is "mostly needed" if you are developing on Mac OS X.