Why is MacPorts using its own libraries?
There are several reasons why MacPorts uses its own libraries. It makes ports more consistent across different versions of Mac OS X. For example, if we can rely on openssl 1.0.0 from MacPorts, we don’t have to test every port that needs ssl for every available openssl installation. Apple’s software tends to break from time to time (e.g. openssl refuses to build with an old zlib, but for awhile Apple shipped the old headers of the vulnerable zlib version). Even if Apple’s versions aren’t broken, they’re rarely up-to-date. Apple has a habit of not updating the libraries in Mac OS X until absolutely necessitated by a security vulnerability. The drawbacks of this policy are minimal: Wasting a few megabytes for e.g. a Python installation is next to nothing if you have a multi-gigabyte hard disk, and the time required to build the additional ports decreases as computers get faster.
