how slow is macports?

How slow is "macports"? I need to install libgtk-x11, starting from
scratch, and I'm guessing I will need to compile it, plus X11, glib,
gcc, etc. How long does this usually take?

In article <tph-F70648.09393406112009@localhost>,
Tom Harrington <> wrote:

> In article
> <150a9851-b52d-4f44-81b1->,
> Alex Miller <> wrote:
>
> > How slow is "macports"? I need to install libgtk-x11, starting from
> > scratch, and I'm guessing I will need to compile it, plus X11, glib,
> > gcc, etc. How long does this usually take?
>
> You mean, just to download and install? It's hard to say, because ports
> often have more dependencies than you'd expect, especially since the
> port you want may depend on one thing, which in turn depends on others,
> etc. The time also depends heavily on just how fast your Mac is and how
> busy it is with other things while it's installing.

I've used MacPorts to install ImageMagick a couple of times on my 1.5
GHz PPC PowerBook. The first time took approximately 2.5 hours. The next
time I closed down everything I didn't need and switched off Time
Machine during the installation. This brought it down to 1.5 hours.

I really recommend switching Time Machine off during a MacPort session,
as it tries to back up all the temporary files.

> Try going to http://www.macports.org/ports.php and looking up the port
> you want. If you're looking for gtk2, the direct dependencies are:
>
> cairo glib2 pango atk fontconfig freetype gettext jasper jpeg libiconv
> libpng pkgconfig shared-mime-info tiff xorg-libXcomposite
> xorg-libXcursor xorg-libXdamage xorg-libXfixes xorg-libXi
> xorg-libXinerama xorg-libXrandr zlib
>
> I haven't looked to see what dependencies those packages might have.

I'm currently using MacPorts to get GNUcash on the same machine, This
has been chugging away for about 6 hours now, and I'm off to bed :-). I
invoked it with the 'time' command, so will know exactly how long it
took in the morning.

--
Paul Sture

In article <tph-73AB6C.17161309112009@localhost>,
Tom Harrington <> wrote:

> In article <paul.nospam->,
> "P. Sture" <> wrote:
>
> > I'm currently using MacPorts to get GNUcash on the same machine, This
> > has been chugging away for about 6 hours now, and I'm off to bed :-). I
> > invoked it with the 'time' command, so will know exactly how long it
> > took in the morning.
>
> I use GNUCash too. After MacPorts repeatedly failed to build it on Snow
> Leopard, I found that there's a pre-built version available at
> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/> that you can just
> download and drop into your Applications folder.
>
> If you find in the morning that MacPorts still can't build GNUCash, I
> highly recommend just getting the pre-built version, it'll save a lot of
> time and trouble.

Thanks Tom.

It did build OK on Leopard, and took 10 hours 25 minutes.

The org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist had the Disabled key set to true.
Easily diagnosed and fixed though.

The documentation and help files are a separate package (gnucash-docs),
which is installing now.

Unfortunately the only prebuilt package for PPC I see at the above link
is 2.2.9 (compared with the current version of 2.3.7), so provided I
don't run into any roadblocks I'll stick with what I have.

--
Paul Sture