I was trying to get octave to work, and figured it needed gnuplot which needed gnuplot-nox which needed to be installed via Fink. I have usually stuck to using homebrew for my package installs.
Are there any problems with having homebrew as your primary package manager while using Fink for installing certain specific packages? Do they ever conflict? Does it make the system unstable?
Homebrew and Fink can coexist, but you need to be careful about not making a mess. In particular, since Homebrew usually builds from source, it could be a problem if you accidentally link Homebrew formulas^Wformulae against Fink-installed software, because the next upgrade might break the dependency. (That problem is probably much less likely now with Homebrew's superenv.) Basically, you need to do the job of the package manager yourself.
That said, Homebrew has an
octaveformula in thehomebrew/sciencetap, so maybe you could just use that.