Mac – Can homebrew and macports work together to let Firefox-X11 be installed

Moving data is dependant on the application that manages it, e.g. if it's a database you could do a dump and restore it on the new installation, if it's a configuration file just copy it, etc.

HomeBrew packages create the config files for launchd in the Cellar (read: formula's install dir) and at the end of the install process display an how-to install those files (the caveats method in formulas source) which generally is a simple cp and launchctl sequence.

Creating formulas is indeed easy, and the developers will happily accept your new or updated formulas. The process is,

In summary: fork, clone, create, commit, push, audit (new-formula)

Last but not least: take a look at the wiki.

Take the path that you used for --prefix= during your ./configure and sym-link that into the Cellar/ directory that Homebrew is using. Homebrew will see these directories and see the dependencies as satisfied (unless you need to have them compiled with or without certain features to make Homebrew's formulas compile correctly). If your manually-compiled deps aren't compiled correctly, you'll probably get errors out of Homebrew.

ln -s /path/from/prefix/ /usr/local/Cellar/path/from/prefix

(Note the trailing slash on the first path, and lack of trailing slash on the second. OS X can be picky about these slashes when creating sym-links.)

This is the wrong way to do it, you should just be using --ignore-dependencies coq — that's what it's there for.