Mac OSX and Homebrew
 

Mac OpenFOAM Friends,

I got a tiny 11-inch MacBook Air on Friday for travel, and since I had a fresh OS and disk I was reevaluating use of MacPorts. Lately, I've become frustrated by MacPorts, and have discovered Homebrew, http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Anyone else use Homebrew? Here are a few links comparing Homebrew to MacPorts and Fink:

http://www.astrobetter.com/do-you-ho...orts-and-fink/
http://tedwise.com/2010/08/28/homebrew-vs-macports/
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/25/homeb...d-line-lovers/

I installed Homebrew, and used it to install git and gnuplot. Seems to be fast and easy. I did use disk images or precompiled binaries for: OpenFOAM-1.6-ext, ipython/scipy/numpy/matplotlib (from Enthought), XCode developer tools (e.g., mpicc), and MacTex-2010.

I think it would be cool if we could develop a Homebrew formula (a package in Homebrew-speak which is a Ruby script) to build OpenFOAM-extend on OSX.

Eric

I saw it once before but didn't try it. One of my main objections is that it installs itself into a standard-location (/usr/local) where it is hard to distinguish it from other stuff that might install itself there without a package manager (there are some packages like this). Of course I understand that this location can be changed but currently I'm quite happy with MacPorts and I had bad experiences in the past with mixing package managers so its unlikely I'll try it in the near future (have got only one mac at my disposal)

I thought about a similar thing for MacPort. Two things made me not think further (apart from not having time to do it properly) and I think they apply here too:

• case sensitivity of the file system (or lack thereof): as long as this is required and as long as a case-sensitive file-system is not the default (it still isn't is it? I havn't heard His Steveness sell it as a new feature "One last thing .... this absolute magical feature. It will change the way we think about files. Now I can go to the AppStore buy an app Foo.app and another one foo.app and they can coexist in the same directory .....") I guess any package-manager repository will not accept it
• multiple versions: the highlander problem. "There can only be one interFoam in the bin-directory". I know not everyone needs multiple versions but for me the non-ability to switch between versions is a real showstopper

What could be a neat idea is to write a recipie "openfoam-1.6-ext-requirements" that installs all the stuff needed for OF (basically by pulling them in as dependencies) so that afterwards compilation of OF can be done by a simple "./Allwmake-noThirdParty"

Bernhard