Hi All

It's debatable where this post should go, so my apologies if it requires moving...

I'm been a Slackware user since 2000, and am relatively proficient at making use of GNU/Linux tools to configure and build software packages (make/autotools etc). Recently though, I've been asked by the man-in-charge to build a complicated set of middleware packages to support an "urgent" in-house process which needs to run on a large scale, based on a prototype built on a mac. I succeeded building the stack on my usual Slackware machine, but due to extenuating circumstances out of my control, I've been given an array of remote Mac machines to build clones of this stack.

I've never touched OSX in my life, but understand it's Unix-based and most of the unix toolsets should be available.

Long story short: I'm wondering if anyone here has any caveats or tips to offer before I dive in, from the perspective of a slacker forced to used OSX. I'm going to be using make, cmake, a bunch of math libraries like blas and lapack amongst others, and it all gets driven by python script (2.7 I'm told).

Most of the packages don't have nice "macports" or pre-built packages, and some have to come out of git repositories.

Any help is appreciated.

Install XCode (if it is not already) then various extra tools can be added by the XCode interface (e.g. XCode Command line tools). MacPorts used to be all the rage but these days everyone I know on a Mac uses Homebrew (for adding additional *nix software).

By the way, in 2012 Homebrew had the highest numbers of unique contributors on Github:

https://github.com/blog/1359-the-octoverse-in-2012

So it is certainly a popular project.

Here's another resource that may be of use:
http://hpc.sourceforge.net/

Thanks folks, I'll look into the links.

If anyone has any more tips, the more the merrier