Morgan Storey wrote: > Uhh Darwin ports... it basically gives you apt-get for mac.
Thats rather a stretch. > I am not a fan > of macs but I am pretty sure it has been around for a while: > http://darwinports.com/ I'd had a Mac for many years. I used to run Debian on it, but when I replaced it I re-installed OSX. Its an old G3 PowerPC model. I have tried Darwin ports and I was not impressed. Darwin ports compared very poorly with Debian or Ubuntu. The problems I faced: - Compiling everything from source on an old slow machine like mine is just horribly painful. - Compiling large/complex packages with lots of obscure depenadances (eg GNU Octave) was hellish because more than half the dependancies were broken. - Depending on upstream source tarballs to be available on hundreds or thousands different web servers all over the planet is plain and simply not reliable. - Darwin ports default versions of autoconf/automake/libtool were not compatible with each other the 2 or 3 times I tried this (all attempts separated by at least a couple of months). This is not an isolated incident, just the only one of many that I can remember now. I'm sure Darwinports works fine for a small number of core packages (ie git, ruby, mysql and a maybe dozen others), but anything not being used by a large numebr of people is likely to be broken. If you want to know what makes the Debian packages so good, look no futher than Debian's build bot (http://buildd.debian.org/). Each and every source package is placed in a minimal chroot environment, the build dependancies listed in the package are installed and then the package is built. Only packages that build successfully are uploaded to the repository. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
