MacPorts

MacPorts (http://www.macports.org) an open-source system for compiling and installing open-source software on the Mac.

The MacPorts online documentation is quite comprehensive. See in particular Chapters 2 (installing MacPorts) and 3 (using Macports).

A couple of hints:

• Make sure the MacPorts bin directory ( /opt/local/bin) is first on your PATH, so that ported files (e.g. Python) get found rather than others.
• The first time you install a package (for example Python) MacPorts will fetch and compile a large number of prerequisites, including the gcc compiler. This may take several hours of compilation, unfortunately. After this initial compile and installation things will be much faster.
• If you have a multi-core machine, be sure and enable parallel building on MacPorts to speed things up.
• The search command will find all packages whose name contains the given string (e.g. port search numpy to find numpy packages). The MacPortsMacintoshInstallation directions use Python 2.6 -- be sure in that case to use Python packages that start with py26, for example py26-numpy. Don't use py-numpy -- that is for Python 2.4.