"Mac OS X is UNIX alright, but to pull most of libraries from MacPorts is the only sane way to manage dependencies."
The only time this is the case is ImageMagik. Everything else is easily manageable by hand unless you insist of mixing it with the normal mac stuff. MacPorts is hardly necessary.
It's unfortunate too, because Apple has one of the best non-package solutions for managing software installs in their .bundle and .app and .framework scheme. It's exquisitely simple and elegant, but everyone seems hesitant to adopt it because, well, because the UNIX way is to use a byzantine and barely functional package system and not incur manifest parsing penalties when apps are loaded.
same thing happened to me. imagemagick has an image viewer app that requires x11.
worse, i did indeed already have x11 installed, but imagemagick didn't like it for some reason, and failed to install. so i pulled down one of the binary distributions instead.
The only time this is the case is ImageMagik. Everything else is easily manageable by hand unless you insist of mixing it with the normal mac stuff. MacPorts is hardly necessary.
It's unfortunate too, because Apple has one of the best non-package solutions for managing software installs in their .bundle and .app and .framework scheme. It's exquisitely simple and elegant, but everyone seems hesitant to adopt it because, well, because the UNIX way is to use a byzantine and barely functional package system and not incur manifest parsing penalties when apps are loaded.