On 25 Oct 2009, at 14:16, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Eric Kow writes:
I'll note that the MacPorts seems to be a common cause of irritation
among Mac users needing to install darcs. The complaint is simply
that
compiling GHC takes forever
This is true, but you know, if you order software from Amazon (or
worse, through your employer's purchasing department) it will take 36
to 72 hours to arrive. GHC might take 8 hours to build on a
4-year-old 1.33GHz iBook G4 with 1.5GB of RAM ... start the build
before you hit the sack and Darcs will be ready in the morning, and
you don't even have to suffer because FreeCell runs slow while you're
waiting. ;-) Perhaps more annoying to some is the need for an
uptodate Xcode as well as MacPorts.
If you need to install a ton of ports to get to that point, that could
be very painful. Still it only needs to happen once.
Can I just add that the use of Darcs for a project can often meet a
lot of resistance from users who have to jump through a lot of hoops
even to get started. CVS and SVN, and I think git as well, are easy
to install (from binaries) on Mac OS; a handful of seconds compared to
the 8 hours mentioned above. Imagine that you want to get someone
started on a new project quickly, and they suddenly find that they
can't begin work because the VC system needs to be compiled; you've
just lost a day of work.
One of the best features (in my opinion) of Darcs is that it is
extremely easy to use. Having MacPorts (or any build-from-source) as
the recommended installation method might turn off a lot of people.
Compared to Linux, Mac OS is a fairly unique and static target (with a
significant userbase), with version increments only every year or so,
which should mean that comprehensively testing binaries is not as hard
as for Linux.
I myself have managed to get by without installing macports, finding
fink usually sufficient for my needs (and remembering my experiences
with Gentoo!).
--
Ian Hinder
[email protected]
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