Linux or OS X on Macbook Pro Retina?

In some circles, people advise against using macports, I guess mostly to
avoid confusion with their versions of things, and the versions that come
with the OS. I neither agree nor disagree with that position. I suppose
that reasoning might apply to homebrew. I'm more inclined to say, if I
don't need those systems I don't use them, and I haven't needed them for
GIS work in Mac OS.

I've used fink, macports and homebrew, and homebrew is clearly the
most robust, and has continued to work for me without problems for the
last two or three years (I had to fairly regularly reinstall fink and
macports from scratch when I used to use them).

Certainly, if you can get away with only using binary installations,
you could do that. But with a little extra effort, you can learn brew,
and instantly have a your fingers a huge range of tools that are
otherwise hard to get.  The other big advantage of brew over hand
installing binaries is that you can easily update packages installed
with brew to the latest version:

brew update
brew outdated
brew upgrade gdal
# or if you want to update everything
brew upgrade

Hadley

--
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/