Gimpin with MacPorts

I want to blog about this and I realize that I basically never write about anything but politics anymore, so it’s kind of weird and out of place. Oh well.

I found out recently about this cool gimp plugin I wanted to try. I use a precompiled Mac version of The Gimp, called “Gimp.app.” I tried to use the various goodies inside it to compile the plugin, with no success. I’d have to compile my own copy of the Gimp to get it to work. And that way lies madness… so many dependencies, so many things that could go wrong… no, wait! I can always use MacPorts! MacPorts is a project to maintain an interdependent system of open source software packages that compile correctly together on OS X. The gimp is available there.

But it wouldn’t compile. I discovered that I’d let my install of macports get pretty out of date. I had to update MacPorts itself, and then do upgrades of all my installed software to the various latest and greatest versions. I had trouble installing one package, sqlite3, because I had installed a copy of it by hand, separately from macports, at one time, and there were a couple files left over interfering with building the new one.

Sadly the version of the Gimp included in macports seems to have a lot of requirements, all kinds of gnome stuff. (I learned just now that you can build it using a “without_gnome” variant. Too late. All the dependencies are already built. Oh well. :)

All this for a silly little plugin…