[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Geoff Oxberry]

On Jan 2, 2015 1:38 PM, "Sean Farley" <sean.michael.farley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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?

`brew info $FORMULA` should supply all options specific to that formula.
There is also syntax for specifying different compilers via the
`--cc=$COMPILER`,  `--cxx=$COMPILER`, etc. switches. In general, I avoid
using non-system compilers unless I have to, because I've been told it can
lead to breakage (via various sources, also h/t Aron Ahmadia).

>
> 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.

I tend to avoid using Homebrew (or any other package manager) to install
Python and Python packages unless absolutely necessary, because it can be
messy. I tend to use pyenv to manage any Python installations for
scientific or development work. I haven't used the bash completion features
of Homebrew much, so I can't speak to that point.
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