Hi @jec0047. I am going to nuke and pave my Mac soon and was intrigued by your comment to checkout MacPorts. After some further research (mainly Saagar Jha’s excellent article and the discussion about it) I am thinking of using MacPorts instead of Homebrew.
I am a noob when it comes to scripting etc. but am able to find my way around the few packages that I rely on. I would be very grateful if you could expand on how it is that you have Python set up on your system. I remember having to jump through a lot of hoops when Python 2 reached EOL and having to symlink things etc., which I gather is not the best idea.
My main questions are:
- Is installing Python on MacPorts as simple as running
sudo port install python37? - I take it that ports can be updated via
sudo port upgrade outdatedbut will this upgrade Python 3.7 to 3.8/further versions when they are released? (As an aside, I see that Python is at version 3.8 but has not even been updated on Homebrew because of some issues
) - How do I ensure that packages/scripts that need Python 3 have access to it without making changes to the macOS Python as per @rms’s advice on another thread?
- Does using Miniconda/Anaconda fit into this (specifically point 3?) I must confess that I know even less about pip/virtual environments than I do about everything I have mentioned so far! It looks like Anaconda would need me to install packages from Conda and so it replaces MacPorts instead of working with it. Would this be correct?
This is a lot to ask so please feel free to ignore bits of it. Thank you!