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by Osmium 4620 days ago
I'd really like to use both macports and homebrew, and switch between them as necessary, but I don't know a good way of doing this. I know homebrew is relatively well-behaved and doesn't really put stuff outside /usr/local, but other things install into /usr/local too so I can't just remove that from my PATH when I want to use macports.

If anyone knows a reliable and simple way to do this I'd be very grateful.

1 comments

I'm not sure to what extent this works with brew, but you could try using virtualenv to manage different environments?

I've never had to deal with multiple configurations on the same mac (my solution, off hand, would be to use debian VMs, possibly through SSH rather than a desktop GUI if I needed >1 at a time.)

Yeah, I'm thinking about going down the VM route with Ubuntu Server inside Parallels. Seems a bit of a waste of computing resources though.
virtualbox is free! And fine for the purposes of running scientific software.

EDIT: and in terms of resource usage, RAM is cheaper than headaches.