I'd stick with MacPorts, because they are doing everything right, behaving like a Linux package installer, trying to be as independent of OS X quirks as possible.
Homebrew otoh always seems a bit hacky, taking too many shortcuts. And they place their stuff in /usr/local which can be a problem in certain cases because it is a standard folder autotools stuff may look in.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21374366/w … ge-installation for a nice discussion (except for the stupid statement that macports overwrites system stuff - it doesn't at all).

Overall for compiling Dosbox it won't make much difference, all required packages are most likely in Homebrew. Only the location will change (macports in /opt/local and homebrew in /usr/local).
I still trust MacPorts much more because these guys know their stuff and have been around for years.
AND I'm not going to be able to help you anymore 😀

Dominus wrote:

behaving like a Linux package installer

You mean like a FreeBSD ports installer 😀

Dominus wrote:

I'd stick with MacPorts, because they are doing everything right, behaving like a Linux package installer, trying to be as independent of OS X quirks as possible.
....
AND I'm not going to be able to help you anymore 😀

All these reasons are good enough for me - especially the last one!

😉

And it turned out that I was able to build my project in a clean OS X 10.11 system without installing MacPorts at all; the resulting build didn't have PNG or network support, but I don't use those anyway. I'm not sure whether this used to be possible, but it seems to be possible now.

So where does SDL and the other dependencies come from?

And does it run on another machine?

Good point about SDL! They come from a build I had made earlier on a machine with MacPorts installed, and simply copied over to the new machine (I copied my whole Development folder from the old machine to the new one).

Will try out the build on another machine and report back...

Well, then you are cheating and are using macports anyway (in a fashion). I'd keep using MacPorts because it helps you keeping those ports up to date...

Doing it this way, I'm sure it will still run on another mac 😉

You're right: I'm getting the benefit of the MacPorts setup that I used on my old machine, so it's not really a no-Ports build.

I just tested the build on a clean Mavericks system running in VMware Fusion, and it did run. The executable is 3.1 MB in size, and that seems to be the size of my earlier builds that could move from one system to the next. (I know this because I distribute my own builds in a system that runs WordPerfect for DOS, and people report that it works.)

Yes, I'll stick with MacPorts - already decided that! But I'll wait to install it until it's absolutely necessary for building.