Yo folks,
in the following I'd like to tell you a little story that happened to
me today... it is, unfortunately, kind of a sad story, but I hope we
can turn it into one with a happy ending eventually :-)
A friend of mine (a fellow student) recently acquired an iBook, and
now wanted to install Fink. So he downloaded the 0.8.0 installer,
which initially went fine.
He then got an error message by the installer, telling him about a
problem setting up his .profile. Luckily I was around and he knew
that I was somehow affiliated with this "Fink thingy". And indeed I
managed to "fix" the broken installation by changing his .profile
to .bashrc (no idea why this was necessary; interestingly, on my
PowerBook, also running 10.4, the exact opposite is the
case: .profile works fine, .bashrc apparently is being ignore). Well
I already filed a bug report for this (may not be our fault, but we
still have to deal with it, I am afraid). So now he went on to
install some stuff.
A bit later I made the mistake of suggesting that he should run a
"fink selfupdate". Fool that I am :-). Well, he did so, using "rsync"
as method. Unfortunately, this failed, too: When fink tried to
install the latest stable version of itself, it errored out. Why?
Well, the fink package requires "make" to run its selftest. Which
isn't available on a plain vanilla system (yeah, he has 10.4, but no
developer tools). So, deciding this was the quickest way to remedy
the problem, I told him to install the make package via apt-get. This
worked fine, and he proceeded to update "fink".
Unfortunately, this rendered the system in a semi-unstable state:
Fink now regularly failed to perform certain operations and printed
lots of Perl warnings. For example, trying to do a "fink update fink-
mirrors". (In fact I think even apt-get started to issues similar
errors, but I can't confirm this right now, so I have to wait till he
answers my email regarding this).
I do not recall the precise errors, but told him to email them to me,
I hope that works out. There is one of them which I *do* recall,
though, and that was in line 664 of VirtPackage.pm. Something about
an empty hash or so (maybe because GCC was not installed on his
system, I wonder?).
Ah well, so in the meantime, he tried out FinkCommander, which told
him to download the latest version. Which he did, but since that just
always crashed when starting it (every single time), we quickly
reverted to the version shipped with Fink 0.8.0 (of course FC is a
separate product, I just thought I'd mention this here anyway, for
completeness).
The end result is that he now is going to install the dev tools,
which hopefully cures most of the above problems. Luckily, installing
octave (the original reason he got Fink) worked just fine, so I don't
have to be totally ashamed that the supposedly superior OS X system
managed just as bad or worse than his previous Windows notebook ;-).
Anyway, the ultimate consequence of this whole experience seems to be
that we badly need a "pure" test system with an OS X install totally
lacking the developer tools.
Maybe we do not want to support such systems, maybe we do want to, I
do not know -- but regardless of which, we shouldn't give a show like
the one described above. At least be polite, and refuse to install if
no dev tools are present; or better, try to cope as good as possible
if it is missing.
Mind you, folks, this isn't meant as a complaint, nor do I want to
tag anybody or something. I just was quite sad to undergo this whole
thing today, and I convinced, if I hadn't been around, my friend
never would have gotten as far as installing octave, and in the end
might just have given up, leaving a rather bad impression about the
Fink project in his mind... which I am very unhappy about :-(. Fink
is much better than that, I see the great work you all are putting
into it all the time, and it's a pity that it gets tainted by this.
Cheers,
Max
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