Rog�rio Brito wrote: > On Aug 25 2002, Martin Costabel wrote: > >>The compiling can easily take a day or two. Just wait until you >>install bundle-kde ;-) That took me 3 days on a G4/733MHz which is >>probably twice as fast as your iBook. > > > Sincerely, I don't understand why some of the distributions of > the fink project aren't available in binary form, especially > due to the fact that some packages take a lot of time to > compile, as the post above confirms.
This has been discussed several times on the fink lists. I'll try to recall some of the arguments. > For those that need newer programs available on unstable and > have only 128MB of RAM, life is quite difficult. True. But with OSX on 128MB of RAM, you need a lot of patience anyway :-) > So, what is the reason for the project not making more > packages available? Lack of horsepower for compiling the > packages? Lack of space for hosting the packages? Yes, both of these. Then there is the problem with some packages having restrictive licenses not permitting to distribute them in binary form. Plus, most importantly, lack of manpower for continually building and testing the compatibility of all the binary packages. Note that there are more than twice as many packages in unstable than in stable. There are many packages in unstable that nobody else besides the maintainer ever compiled (or nobody ever admitted doing so). Some packages have known problems. All of them are in permanent evolution, and not all versions are always guaranteed to be compatible with the rest. Imagine what a flood of complaints would break over the fink beginners list if somebody just made his collection of unstable compiled *.debs publicly available. The manpower for dealing with all these complaints isn't there either. > I think that the former problem could easily be solved with a > build daemon, similar to what Debian uses, with some host > machines doing the hard work. Who is going to build the software and hardware infrastructure for this? On the manpower side, Fink is *tiny* compared to Debian. Debian has probably 20 to 50 times (!) as many developers as Fink. They even have full-time developers. Just have a look at the debian's partners page http://www.debian.org/partners/ and think for a while. There is nothing comparable for Fink. Right now, Fink's manpower is stressed to the limit by preparing a new binary distribution of the *stable* tree for Mac OSX 10.1, and at the same time testing and updating all packages for Jaguar. (As an aside: I am only sitting here answering questions on fink-beginners instead of compiling away on Jaguar, because Apple France were to dumb to send me my Jaguar until now. It's spending the weekend in some transport company's store in Holland of all places :-( ) > OTOH, another option for that would be to make a binary > repository (possibly with unofficial status) of > user-contributed (compiled) packages in form of an > apt-get'able source. Nobody is going to stop anyone to offer a high-bandwidth http server for such a thing. This is very easy to set up, and anyone can point their apt/sources.list file to such a server. The only requirement would be to offer support, i.e. to answer all questions about problems with packages in the repository. > It would also make using fink a much more feasible option for > some users like me, with limited resources. You could do this also privately, if you have a friend with a DSL connection, for example, or just with a bigger/faster Mac. They could either set up an http server with a fink repository inside, or send you their *.deb files by mail or ftp. > Honestly, this is the biggest problem I see with fink. Maybe your problem would already be addressed by more frequent releases of the *stable* fink distribution. Right now, the stable tree in cvs has many more packages than the last 0.4.0a binary release, and almost all packages have been updated to newer versions since. Therefore a new binary release is overdue, and it will indeed appear soon. The question of more frequent releases of the stable tree has also been discussed and everybody is all for it, but once again it's a problem of manpower. -- Martin ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: OSDN - Tired of that same old cell phone? Get a new here for FREE! https://www.inphonic.com/r.asp?r=sourceforge1&refcode1=vs3390 _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-beginners
