So after a full reinstall of Leopard, my Mac seems to be behaving a bit more like it should. I wonder what the odds are of getting a corrupt OS from the factory.
MacPorts seems like a nice idea, and the list of software is decent. My two complaints (what, you thought I wouldn't have any?):
- 1) It's slow as hell. I've been installing Haskell for the last twenty minutes.
- The .dmg-based installer forgets one minor detail, namely changing the $PATH variable. Looking through the instructions for compiling from source, it seems that adding
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
to .profile or .bashrc fixes the issue. I'm sure there's a more elegant approach, but this allowed me to get started on the lengthy process of installing something that would be a single command on Ubuntu.
Building compilers is often slow. Haskell is self-hosted so it has to bootstrap itself which makes it even slower.
The maintainer for the ghc port actually just got an account on the geeklair so he could make sure the PPC build works.
The .dmg installer is craptastic (and should have been fixed with an updated release years ago, but there has been stupidity in the project). Personally, I would rather not have the installer modify the $PATH, but people want it, so it's there. It was just broken in the last release because of inadequate testing. The next release (coming really soon) should fix that, and installing from source works as expected.