On Oct 19, 2006, at 1:38 AM, bcsi wrote: > Dan - > > My previous message referred to installing the binary for zenity. > So I'm encouraged to hear that the sizes of the dependencies would > be available for display *-before-* the user is asked for > confirmation. I'd consider that a high priority, but more generally: > > On the Mac where "GUI R us", a polished front-end could serve as a > showcase, presenting free / open source software as accessible and > attractive to OS X users. > > If that's a significant element of Fink's mission, it seems > incongruous and sad to have to recommend commercial, shareware, or > even freeware apps in place of Fink Commander.
Whether that should be part of Fink's mission or not has been a subject of some debate. Fink is like a middleman, making thousands of open source programs available on Mac OS X, most of which started life on Unix or Linux platforms. These programs themselves tend to be very un-Mac like: they are command line tools, or they run in the X11 environment, and so on. So one argument says that since folks who will be using these tools won't be doing so via the Apple GUI, installing the tools via the Apple GUI isn't so important. Nevertheless, we have FinkCommander, and at the time it was developed, it was a great front-end for Fink. As Dan said, though, FinkCommander has not fully kept up with developments in Fink. > > What would be the best venue to discuss details of restarting / > replacing Fink Commander? I'd start with questions like, "How is it > currently implemented -- an Objective C program, or a script?" and > "What documentation is available, if any?" and "Is the original > author willing & able to answer questions?". FinkCommander is an open source project hosted at http:// finkcommander.sourceforge.net/, with its source code fully available for inspection and modification. (I believe its written in Objective C, but am not certain.) The original author, Steven Burr, has been absent for years; however, we are still in contact with one or two of the folks on the official developers list and it should be possible to add new people to the list and restart work on the project should there be interest in doing so. As you may have inferred from Dan's message, the Fink project is significantly understaffed. This means that not everything that we would like to see happen does happen, but it also means that skilled and motivated volunteers are always welcome. -- Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-beginners
