The macports couchdb port has problems. The hip thing to do would probably be switching over to homebrew, but I dislike brew for a couple of reasons, which are beyond the scope of this writeup. Also, building from source failed for me with some strange problem in the makefile, that I'll hunt down later.
- couchdb's javascript viewserver couchjs links against libjs.dylib, which is supplied by the spidermonkey port. That port is ancient, but cannot be easily upgraded because of, well... mongodb. That means: no ES5-goodness for the rest of us. :-(