Hi Adam, I use MacPorts, I've used a lot of package management systems and MacPorts is a very mature and stable package management system, but like some others (I'm thinking Gentoo's and Ubuntu's) it still tracks new releases very well.
Greg mentioned that MacPorts installs a full duplicate structure (basically it installs a full GNU system) - this is true, but there is a very good reason. The base OSX packages/libs are Universal builds whereas MacPorts will (correctly in my opinion) builds for your architecture only. If it then tried to link the (eg.) Intel-only binaries against Universal libs then it would fail miserably. I'd like to add that if people are building binaries by hand then they are either (a) building arch-specific binaries and therefore running the risk of linking with Universal libs or (b) building Universal binaries and suffering the performance and size penalties involved there. Bradly mentioned MacPorts pulling in "strange dependencies". You can't really have a dependency resolver without sometimes being surprised by the dependencies. Conveniently, MacPorts has support for what it calls variants, which are basically analogous to the various --with options that many ./configure scripts will accept. You can set these for your whole system too, and you can set negatives. Eg. you can set -perl which will mean that for any port which has 'perl' defined as a variant you have configured your system to build without including perl. In practice this allows you to have a decent control over how packages are built, while still enjoying the simplicity of a package manager. For the record, I just use the ports command-line tool. The GUI seems unnecessary. My opinion of Fink when I checked it out a couple of years ago was that the packages were not well maintained, so they had a long lag behind the releases. In fact a quick check just now shows that Ruby 1.9 is still not available in Fink - that makes that system useless to me. I've not used homebrew because I struggle to see what it adds. It's basically the same as a manual install - but without any ability to customize the ./configure step. Seems to just be a --prefix setting and some compile flags - maybe I'm missing something? *shrug* Cheers, Jason On Dec 5, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Adam Grant wrote: > Hi, > > I was wondering what the Mac people here use to install software on their > Macs. MacPorts? Darwin? I know Ubuntu pretty much has aptitude, and Redhat > has yum, but I wasn't sure what the "preferred" way is for Macs. I saw that > Porticus wraps MacPorts in a GUI, but what do you all use? > > Thanks, > Adam > > -- > Adam Grant > Lead Web Engineer > Telaeris, Inc. > [email protected] > (858) 627-9710 > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
