Darian Lanx wrote: []
If Apple would not cripple basically every open source package that they put into OSX, Fink could get away with a lot less packages, and this would make it more attractive.I beg to differ. Apple has a lot of work keeping their own system sane and on respectable version numbers. Just because 10,.3 came with relatively recent open source tools, it does nto mean they will provide timely updates when those projects change their release cycles or release new updates. I consider texinfo to be a fairly "common" unix tool and still I am sure Apple would not release a new package when they release new software. Thus it does make sense to have such packages in Fink, because some of us might like t have the most recent version installed.
Not a good example, since Fink's version is much older than the one in 10.3 ;-) Actually, not only for Apple, but also for Fink there are sometimes reasons not to update too frequently. In the whole TeX/ghostscript/XEmacs area, Fink is not at the bleeding edge, and this is good so, because for such tools that are essential for the daily work of many of us, stability is more important than gadgets.
I have nothing against Fink packages that duplicate things in OSX, provided that
- the reason why such a package exists is stated somewhere, so that when this reason goes away, the package can go away, too (or fade into the background), as was the case with packages man, mandoc, zlib, dlcompat, freetype2 etc. I wish it could happen to the *zip[2] and tar packages and to python
- it is not used as a standard dependency by other packages if it can be avoided. If possible at all, they should be built against the OSX version instead.
I admit that this has been one of my pet peeves with Fink for more than two years, but I am still seeing a lot of Unix-savvy and Mac-savvy colleagues of mine unwilling to install Fink on their Mac, because Fink starts by installing a whole bunch of stuff on their machine that is already there.
-- Martin
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