installing Gary K. Cheng's macs in Mac

I want to install macs  in my Mac running Yosemite. It would not compile using make as I lack the boost library . Following advice on the web,  I install macports (using the Yosemite pkg), then

sudo port -v selfupdate

sudo port install libxslt docbook-xsl docbook-xml-4.2

Does not work (the compiler does not find the library) and I cannot find any  boost library using find. My feeling is that the library is not even installed. Then I find this page so I will try it:

1. Download boost_1_60_0.tar.bz2.
2. In the directory where you want to put the Boost installation, execute

   tar --bzip2 -xf /path/to/boost_1_60_0.tar.bz2

Then I modify the makefile to have

LIB = -I /Users/andres/save/boost_1_60_0

and it does work, so there was no point in installing macports or boost itself... does not matter.