On Nov 26, 2009, at 5:54 AM, Frank J. R. Hanstick wrote:
One reason I chose MacPorts over Fink was that there were more
ports available. That may or may not be true now because I have not
used Fink in a while.
I think it has always been the opposite, I could be wrong. But the
best that I can remember, Fink has always outnumbered MacPorts on
volume of "packages".
10270 today in Fink, versus 6378 today in MacPorts.
My experience though, is that number is misleading, in that the large
majority of MacPorts Portfiles work, whereas I always found the large
majority of packages in Fink did not work, or were not what I was
looking for.
Unless Fink had changed, there were still a lot of ports that came
with assembly required. Not all ports came as packages.
Correct. I would not even know how you would go about making
something like a php5 package. Others have, the Entropy guy has done
great work there. Though if you spend any time on his forums, it is
nothing but a request festival for addition of this or that module.
I suspect a lot of other software is not this way, and one universal
binary in package format would suffice. However, unless I am on a
totally different page, you can make packages in MacPorts now. They
seemed to work fine for me, on simple tests.
I was able to make an "Apple like" installer, that installed and put
the app where it needed to go.
I find it nice in some respects to know that it builds on my system,
and does so clean. You do not always get that with pre-built
software. It appears to work, and works well for some time, and you
run into some edge case where it breaks. While I sit here and knock
on wood, that largely does not happen with building it on your own, or
with the aid of a compile manager like Mac Ports, as you must work out
the errors or it is not usable at all.
I prefer MacPorts over doing it myself because someone greatly
appreciated ensured that all the dependencies were taken care of
beforehand. I spent many hours having to figure out what
dependencies were required for what ports and what version of a
particular dependency was required. MacPorts is a great time saver
there.
Could not agree more.
A feature in Fink that I liked was the notification of what
dependencies were being loaded before hand which gave an indication
of how long the installation would be. I do not like the fact that
MacPorts does nothing to indicate that it is working an
installation. I would prefer to have little dots or the title of
the current module appear in the terminal window to alleviate the
boredom and give a notation of progress (I do not like the repeated
compilation lines from a non-MacPorts installation because it eats
up my history space).
Nothing is ever perfect and each has good and bad features.
There is `sudo port -d install portname` which will give you a lot
more data to let you know what is going on. I do tend to agree, some
form of status update between a plain port install and a -d based one
would be nice. -d is just too much data most of the time.
You can pepper your Porfile with ui messages, but those are only going
to show up in each phase of the Portfile as it progresses. I believe
this is something that has to go into the core of MacPorts, where
there was a timer of some form, and it would keep track of every 15
seconds or so, and say "working on.... ( last thing that was just
asked to be done... )
Since this type of functionality is not already in MacPorts, I can
only estimate that it is a bit of a tough one to implement. I do know
I have asked about interactive installations in the past, and was told
those are not possible. This is, to a lesser degree, similar.
--
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *
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