title: Install .tar.gz on MAC
body: <p>I failed to understand the INSTALL.md file. I know few programming knowledge. I appreciate anyone can give me a thorough explanation or instruction.</p>
  <p>The software I wanna install is <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/scidavis/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sourceforge.net/projects/scidavis/</a></p>
  <p>Information in INSTALL.md</p>
  <h2>Mac OS X - MacPorts instructions</h2>
  <p>These notes refer to use MacPorts. Using other build environments such
  as HomeBrew is presumably equally as viable, but you may need to hack
  the config files a bit.</p>
  <ol>
  <li><p>Install <a href="https://www.macports.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MacPorts</a>.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>Install <a href="https://guide.macports.org/#installing.xcode" rel="nofollow noreferrer">XCode and XCode command line
  tools</a></p>
  </li>
  <li><p>If you want to be able to run your build on an earlier version of
  MacOSX than your build machine, see <a href="http://www.hpcoders.com.au/blog/?p=100" rel="nofollow noreferrer">How to build a Macintosh
  executable that will run on older versions of
  MacOSX.</a></p>
  </li>
  <li><p>Install the prerequisites for scidavis.</p>
  </li>
  </ol>
  <ul>
  <li>port install qt4-mac qwt52 qwtplot3d boost gsl py27-pyqt4 py-pyqwt py27-sip muparser<br>
  Sadly, you may need to do this step multiple times before eveything
  is installed</li>
  </ul>
  <ol start="4">
  <li>link sip-2.7 share directory to where sip expects it to be:</li>
  </ol>
  <pre><code>ln -sf /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/share/sip /opt/local/share/py27-sip
  </code></pre>
  <ol start="5">
  <li>Add qt's bin directory to your PATH</li>
  </ol>
  <ul>
  <li>PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/libexec/qt4/bin:$PATH</li>
  </ul>
  <ol start="6">
  <li>Configure scidavis</li>
  </ol>
  <ul>
  <li>qmake CONFIG+=osx_dist</li>
  </ul>
  <ol start="7">
  <li>Build scidavis</li>
  </ol>
  <ul>
  <li>make qmake</li>
  <li>make</li>
  </ul>
  <ol start="8">
  <li>Create the installable package</li>
  </ol>
  <ul>
  <li>sh mkMacDist.sh</li>
  </ul>
  <p>Thanks in advance</p>