For the record, I found cmake to be the best. The output is great, the convenience is awesome, the only thing that bugs me is the strange syntax, which is fine because once you set it up it gets out of your way fine.
Though it doesn't reach all the dark corners that cmake does, I found premake to be much easier to figure out and customize. All the configuration is done in Lua and you can customize the state with a normal programming language as opposed to the crazy cmake arcana you sometimes have to resort to.
To both parents: whenever I have to install and work out how to debug yet another C build system on my Mac (default build settings never work on Macs), it leaves me wanting to (and indeed going on to) rewrite entire libraries I should be just using. (notable exception: autohell seems to work, some of the time, and it even sometimes fails with an error telling me what's wrong.)
When I use python extensions (often written in C), this problem doesn't arise because distutils, and sometimes cython, handle everything.
Python isn't the best C build system, but frankly it scores better than cmake and friends for ease of use.
Oh, yeah, definitely, I wish everything was as easy as "pip install". On the other hand, I can sympathize with nothing working on macs. This is because the environment plain sucks.
All the installed tools and libraries are old as hell and rarely get updated, and it's riddled with quirks and tools that are subtly different on osx. I hear it's gotten better with Mountain Lion.
Macports is my tool of choice, but yes it's the only way to get things done! Unfortunately, plenty of scientific libraries are too obscure to be ported, leaving it to us scientists...
Interesting what you say about 10.8 - I might give it a shot then. I will be upgrading soon from snow leopard (2009 MBP) and I was going to wipe and go debian/XFCE, because of all the "new ideas" like "let's not have save as" etc, but if installing stuff is easier (and I know multitouch works) I might give it a go.
I halfway solution I'm reasonably happy with is to have a VirtualBox install of Debian on top of OSX, and install most scientific libraries there. I've considered just wiping and installing Debian as the main OS, but when I first looked the Linux driver support for my MBP wasn't great, and since then I just haven't gotten around to it. VirtualBox works fine for anything that isn't too heavy duty, and anything heavy-duty I'm running on a beefier server machine anyway.
This is a good idea. The problem I have is that I sometimes need basically all my RAM for simulations (yes, occasionally even on my laptop) and my current only has 4GB (with OS X eating up about 1.5GB on startup for "kernel tasks") so it's dangerous to run a VM with more than 2GB. New laptop will def have 8GB though, so this solution becomes viable again, thanks :)
hmm, If I can get Arch to install, I might give it a go. Ubuntu was a bit pants when I tried it for a month early last year (had installed Lion, was pants on the old machine, tried ubuntu before rolling back to SL.) Multitouch gestures for multiple desktops is a must now that I've got used to it...
