[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Sean Farley]

Geoff Oxberry writes:

> On Jan 1, 2015 8:46 PM, "Sean Farley" <sean.michael.farley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Jed Brown writes:
>>
>> > Geoff Oxberry <goxberry at gmail.com> writes:
>> >> Brew bottles were originally only used in situations where building
> from
>> >> source would take a long time, and under the assumption that most
> users are
>> >> interested in a "standard" build without any command-line options.
>> >
>> > The dependency model assumes that flags do not change the binary
>> > interface.  This relates to the two things hard in Computer Science:
>> > cache invalidation and naming things.  I think Homebrew is refusing to
>> > acknowledge that different binary interfaces need different "names".
>>
>> This is one of the major issues I had with homebrew.
>>
>
> Sean, I'm confused: doesn't MacPorts do something similar with portfiles
> and variants? If a user wishes to install a variant for which a binary is
> unavailable, that port variant is then built from source, correct?
> (Assuming the MacPorts configuration is set up accordingly, per
> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/BinaryArchives)

I misunderstood what Jed meant, then. And yes, MacPorts variants does
the same (assume that the ABI is the same). This problem is one I've
seen with most (all?) package managers.

The problem I had with homebrew (when I tried it) was that I couldn't
specify different variants easily (such as package+gcc48 vs
package+gcc49). Perhaps that has changed?

Recently, I tried to evaluate homebrew but stopped when I ran into
trouble with bash completion and the way it handles (or doesn't handle)
multiple python packages for different versions of python.