Sorry to take so long getting back -- in the process of setting up this new iBook I lost connectivity. If my question seems like the kind of cry from the heart that really doesn't belong in help mailing lists run by unpaid folks like yourselves, the reason why I posted to -beginners instead of -users is that I'm not yet situated well enough to ask intelligent questions.
Max Horn wrote: > Others have already replied to other parts of your email, but let me > reply to that last sentence: There is no way to "install ever one of > the bazillion standard packages". Simple reason, we have no clue what > *you* consider to be one of the bazillion standard packages. For you, > textutils might be essential, for many others the versions of the tools > found in textutils which are already shipped with the OS are > sufficient; or maybe they do not even use a single of them. > > If you mean "the packages which are standard on a GNU/Linux system", > that's something slightly different, although even there I don't think > there is any real standard. But then, we are not a Linux distro. On > Linux these packages are essential installs on your system (if you > don't have textutils installed, you usually don't have any of the tools > in it). On Mac OS X this is quite different, all core Unix tools ship > with the OS, just in the BSD versions, not the GNU versions (besides a > few exceptions like GNU make). > The kind of functionality I'm looking for is absolutely and unapologetically something like a distribution. I realize that fink is not that, but OS X is also not that, so fink appears to be the de facto place to look. My definition of a working out-of-the-box unix is one that has all the boring stuff like sha1sum and less. (But maybe what I'm missing here is that those are Gnu/Linux, not BSD...) Like the vast majority of PC owners, I have more disk than time. It doesn't bother me to have portions of ImageMagick that I'm never going to use. The granularity of how much stuff I install to get a new system running should be on the order of 500MB/ 5 GB/ 50GB, not 100K/ 118K/ 123K, etc. > Hope that clarifies it a bit. :-) Thanks for taking the time, and sorry to generate extra work while I flail. I'm getting the impression that there's an open opportunity to do something like a distribution, and unless I feel like volunteering I should just do what everybody else does and assemble my own distro from tiny bits and pieces. - Lucas ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Etnus, makers of TotalView, The debugger for complex code. Debugging C/C++ programs can leave you feeling lost and disoriented. TotalView can help you find your way. Available on major UNIX and Linux platforms. Try it free. www.etnus.com _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-beginners
