On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Joel Hacker wrote: > It wouldn't help the user, not directly anyway. I mainly think this > would be a good idea for the maintainers. Having only ONE app to > maintain, and that ONE app making it possible to run ALL the open-source > software on a Mac without having to reboot. Get it?
No, I don't. I think you're assuming that Linux itself is some kind of monolithic, standardized machine. It isn't. Installing new software can be adversely impacted by the kernel version, the libc version, a slew of other libraries, etc. all of which vary widely from one distribution to another and within versions of each distribution. The general strategy then usually isn't to have one "linux" version of a given open source package, but rather a good configuration script that will be dynamic enough to figure out what parts of the *nix toolkit are available and build accordingly. This does allow one package to work on any *nix with hopefully more or less painless effort, and that should generally include Darwin or Darwin/Fink. The catch is that [a] Darwin is still relatively young, so not all software is being written with portability to it in mind (though this isn't a huge obstacle & in any case the situation is improving), and more importantly [b] most developers will write & test for the platform they happen to be working with, and getting it to work elsewhere -- whether that means other flavors of Linux, BSD, Solaris, Darwin, or Cygwin -- often comes later if it comes at all. This problem isn't new and it isn't going to go away. So again, the less painful apparoach is just to port. Most of the software is more or less going to work anyway, because Darwin is more or less similar to the platform most of this software was written on & for. Wedging in a new [virtual] kernel isn't going to make porting any easier, and it's going to incur a possibly serious performance hit. If you want some kind of porting homogenieity, check out GNU/Darwin. Those people are trying to bring FreeBSD's ports system to Darwin by rigidly enforcing BSD conventions on the Mac. On one hand, they're getting a lot of traction out of it -- they claim to have far more ported software than Fink, and they may be right. On the other hand, they arn't adapting to the system, accounting for it's strengths & weaknesses, so I for one have been generally happier with the more-adapted work that Fink has provided than the hammered-in GNU/Darwin approach. But obviously there is something to be said for their strategy if it's working for them, and if you'd like something along the lines of what you're asking for, you might want to take a look at their project. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Fink-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-users
