|
I've used Linux for the last 9 years and I got used to so many free (as in beer) programs that I don't want to miss them anymore, even after my desktop migration from Linux & BSD to Mac OS X/Darwin.
Therefore, I've tried to find an good packagemanager which offers wide varity of programs in it's repository. For OS X, you've two well known choices: Either fink or macports.
Fink is an attempt to bring the powerful apt packagemanager from debian to Mac OS X. It provides binary package and even builds from source. So if you're in a rush, you don't need to want 3h until you much needed program and all of it's dependencies are compiled. The alternative is macports which is a BSD like ports system so that you need to compile every program from source. Both have a big packages database:
- fink: 9035
- macports: 5052
as the time of writing. My main problem with both of them is that one solution doesn't provide the few programs I need. As an example, I still use claws-mail and kdevelop, but claws-mail is not in the fink repository and kdevelop not in the macports repository. So I'll need both of them which isn't an ideal situation as far as I am concerned. Further more macports is too slow, because I need to compile everything from source. This means, if desperately need a program, maybe it's compiled when it's too late …
That's why I was thinking about a real alternative to both. Because I've used NetBSD and FreeBSD for a long time (3 years), I really got used to the ports system and, of course, to the binary packages and the easy management of the ports system. The FreeBSD ports is too tidely integrated into FreeBSD to easyly use it on a different base system (OS). But NetBSD uses pkgsrc which is like all netbsd stuff a portable system. And it runs on a tone of different operating systems.
This brings me to my main point: Why don't use pkgsrc with Mac OS X? Mac OS X is on the supported list of operating systems, but only binary packages for ppc Systems are distributed. But packaging with the help of pbulk isn't all that tricky.
My idea is to run a bulk build on pkgsrc for mac/intel and then distribute it so that everyone can use it.
Another advantage of pkgsrc is that you can use binary packages, but if you need a special package with some options turned on or off, you can just compile this package from source with you preferred options and use binary packages for the rest.
Yesterday I've started to take a look at pkgsrc and I've tried to compile some programs and create packages. So far my success isn't overwhelming, but I need to dig deeper into pkgsrc … So I guess I will take some time to see where it goes.
This doesn't mean that I think this will become a alternative to macports or fink and not that macports or fink aren't good. These are just some thoughts about pkgsrc and OS X.
And for real I think that my humbled attempt to create some packages will not success …
|
