Python3 on MacOsX Lion?

[Ned Deily]

In article <WepMq.67154$U16.54498 at newsfe15.iad>,
 K Richard Pixley <rich at noir.com> wrote:
> On 1/2/12 13:03 , Benjamin Kaplan wrote:
[...]
> > Have you tried building through Macports?
> No, I haven't.  Macports scares me.  When I tried them, or fink, in the 
> past, they rapidly polluted my boot disk and I didn't have any way to 
> unpollute it other than reloading from scratch.
> 
> In freebsd, netbsd, or any of the linux distributions, I can trivially 
> create a virtual machine in about 20 minutes, screw with it as I like, 
> and toss it in seconds.  In modern linux, I can create a root file 
> system with btrfs, snapshot, chroot to the snapshot and munge away. 
> When I'm done, I can just toss the snapshot.  (Can do snapshots in 
> vmware too).
> 
> If I screw up my boot drive in MacOsX, I'm in for hours of recovery time 
> reloading from Time Machine.  While that's a lot better than it used to 
> be now that Time Machine is available, (reloading can now be done 
> largely unattended), it's not a price I'm willing to pay in order to 
> attempt to use Macports.

Whether you use a third-party package manager like MacPorts or Fink is a 
personal decision, of course, and there pros or cons for using either.  
But both MacPorts and Fink are specifically designed *not* to pollute 
your existing system.  They both go to great lengths to install 
everything under their own unique directory subtrees, by default, 
/opt/local for MacPorts and /sw for Fink.  I don't have much recent 
experience with Fink but I do with MacPorts.  Other than a very few and 
documented exceptions, *everything* that MacPorts installs is under that 
/opt/local prefix and there are no conflicts with any Apple-installed 
files so it is really quite trivial to install and remove without fear 
of corrupting your base system.  The whole process is documented here:

http://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.macports.uninstalling.html

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org