MacPorts for Weather and Science

Not much of an actual blog post as much as a reminder list for myself when it comes to setting up a new mac for developing code for science. A while back I posted an entry about selecting between MacPorts and Fink (link) so I won't discuss that here... bottom line is that they are both great and both work, it mostly depends on which you are more comfortable with and secondly specific individual ports that are not in both, but the number is few.

Anyways so here is my list that I install (and in order of how I installed them the last time):

1. gcc (latest version available unless otherwise needed, at the time of writing this, gcc45 is the latest and includes gfortran)
   
2. gcc_select (with mac ports, I don't think it is available on fink, but there is probably a similar package)
3. gnuplot
4. python (latest 2.x and 3.x versions)
5. python_select
   
6. netcdf, netcdf-bin
7. hdf5
8. grads
9. vis5d
   
10. gdal
11. grass
12. gmt
13. gnupg
14. wget
15. py26-setuptools (or latest/equivalent to the version of python installed)
16. py26-numpy
17. py26-scipy
18. py26-matplotlib

Now this is the list I've installed specifically, I won't even begin to list the number of packages that are prerequisites for packages that are installed as well.

pointless dumb bugs...

As I briefly mentioned yesterday in my post about 'Eclipse, Subversion and Mac OSX' along with my SVN issues on my Mac I was having SVN issues on my Centos 5 box relating to Python and the setuptools. Well while thinking it was an SVN issue help me solve my Mac problem, it actually had nothing to do with my Centos/easy_install problem. Basically after I finished fixing my Mac/Eclipse issue I took the time to actually read the error I was recieving when installing 'eggs' via easy_install. The error actually was a simple Python error.

error: global 'log' not declared.

sorry I don't remember the exact error and since I've fixed it, I don't exactly see it any more

Anyways... so it turns out the Python imports were not being passed between packages 'correctly', or it just wasn't working on my server... anyways the simple fix was to add the following line to the file/package in question:

from distutils import log

 the file on my end was '/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setuptools/command/sdist.py'. It is probably an error in other packages too, but as since I haven't run into them yet.... All I hope is that it gets fixed with future updates, we'll see what happens.