New Fink Binary Distribution 0.5.2

dmalloc writes "The Fink Project community and contributors announced the availability of the Fink Binary Distribution 0.5.2, which adds binaries for KDE 3.1, Koffice 1.2.1, and Kdevelop 3.0a3, new documentation/manuals, and improved support for Apple's X11 Server along with speed improvements to fink itself. Download instructions are on the Fink site."

Comments

Include More Info

[avalys]

If we're going to make Slashdot into Freshmeat (which is fine with me, to a point), submitters should at least include information on what the program actually does!

Especially when the server is Slashdotted (admittedly not the case here) and the rest of us are wondering: "should I care about this?"

Re:Include More Info

[potuncle]

I'm no expert, but have found fink to be an awesome addition to OS X. It brings many (I think 5000+) software packages and apps from the UNIX/LINUX/BSD world to OS X. It can be a major selling point on OS X for UNIX/LINUX/BSD users. Now they can have the Aquaesqe goodness, along with the power and flexibility of UNIX/LINUX/BSD apps and libraries.

Don't use if your default shell is /bin/zsh

[Sniffer]

The init.sh script pukes with /bin/zsh as your shell....

Re:Don't use if your default shell is /bin/zsh

[rdieter]

you probably shouldn't be changing root's shell either.

Re:Don't use if your default shell is /bin/zsh

[ZxCv]

Why?

I've heard this a number of times, mostly from an old Solaris admin I used to work with. Yet, in 8 or so years of administering all kinds of *nix boxes, I have yet to run into a single problem that was caused by changing root's shell. I can see being careful about it, but then again, you should be careful about everything you do as root. It seems to me that anything that relies on root having a specific shell is inherently broken software to begin with, and shouldn't be run as root at all.

I've administered everything from Solaris to FreeBSD to Linux and now Mac OS X, and I've used many shells for root among them, including ksh, zsh, csh, and bash. The day I'm forced to use a particular shell for root is the day I find a new operating system.

Re:Fink and Mcafee virus

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not fixed, and it's totally McAfee's fault. They have used Fink themselves in-house to create Virex 7.2's auto-update feature, however the way they've implemented it totally breaks both Fink and Virex.

This is not Fink's fault, and there is *nothing* they can do to fix it. Want to complain? E-mail McAfee.

Re:Fink and Mcafee virus

[Mikey-San]

The gist of the situation:

McAfee used Fink during the development of Virex, and as such, if you're using Virex and try to install Fink--well, you can't install Fink, so I won't finish that thought.

It's not a problem with Fink. Virex is causing the problem, and unfortunately, until McAfee get their act together, Fink and Virex can't be installed on the same machine.

Fink, when instaled, looks for /sw, and if it finds it, it doesn't install. This might look like Fink's problem, but in reality, it's Fink trying its absolute best not to do anything that might harm your machine. (They use /sw instead of other binary directories for the same reason.) Much applause to the Fink team for these conventions, I say. Developers looking out for users is always a good thing, even when some might think they [the developers] are being overly cautious.

Check out this thread for more discussion.

Re:Fink and Mcafee virus

[pcp_ip]

virex and fink are fine now. download 7.2.1 from mac.com.

to fix a messed up fink from 7.2 just:

fink reinstall openssl-shlibs dlcompat-shlibs curl-ssl-shlibs

and you're set to go.

Upgrade Instructions

[Anonymous Coward]

The link in the story is about how to download fink for your first time, not upgrade. If, like most people, you have a mix of binary (ie from apt-get) and source (ie from fink) packages in your fink distro, you'll want to do the following:

sudo apt-get update # new package descriptions
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # download and install binaries (this takes a long time)
fink selfupdate # update fink itself
fink update-all # download, compile, and install source packages

If you have trouble, a fink index or fink scanpackages command can help out sometimes. The Upgrade Matrix or Upgrade page in the manual would have been better links for the slashdot article, imho.

avalys: If we're going to make Slashdot into Freshmeat (which is fine with me, to a point), submitters should at least include information on what the program actually does!

C'mon, now, thats not fair. Fink is more than just another program; it's a whole software distro. If they can announce new versions of debian and redhat, they can announce new versions of fink. This announcement really means new versions of hundreds of programs.

KOffice: glad to have you on board!

[Steve Cowan]

Koffice isn't why you should upgrade Fink.

KOffice may not be the best suite out there, but by providing an OS X port, there is a much stronger motivation to develop KOffice.

Everybody benefits: another title for the Mac, it's free (as in beer), expanded KOffice user base, yet another reason for Mac users to use Fink, freedom of choice.....

It's an exciting time to be a Mac user. I honestly would not be surprised to hear that applications are becoming available to Mac users faster than new apps are being developed for Windows. In other words, the list of Mac-compatible desktop software titles may be growing at a faster rate than the list of Windows titles.

Info yes, Freshmeat no

[fm6]

You're right about the "what is it" factor. Too many Slashdot articles assume that everybody has heard about Fink, or Joe, or Sesquipedialian Architectures.

But I don't think this kind of announcement duplicates anything at Freshmeat. (What's Freshmeat?) That site is for people who already run specific platforms, and are curious to see what's being developed for those platforms. But you don't have to be a OS X enthusiast to be interested in the doings of the Fink team.

Perl and Fink

[sco08y]

One problem I have is getting perl and Fink to behave. I don't think this is Fink's fault, but I've checked the site and haven't seen a very good solution.

For starters, if you upgrade Fink's version of perl, then all the old perl libraries will be binary incompatible. (And here, Apache + mod_perl counts as a "library" since it won't boot.)

Do I go and rebuild all my libraries? Or rebuild the default install of perl? Or muck about with @INC? I could do that... but it defeats the purpose of Fink.

Maybe it's safer to have multiple versions, and I can certainly uninstall Fink very easily, but it still seems to be a bit of a mess.

Even if you avoid the package manager and build everything manually Fink still saves a huge amount of time because all the annoying fixes are already there. But it's disappointing that we're not really that much better than Windows when it comes to simple issues like binary compatibility. (Honestly, how is it any different than DLL-hell?)

I'm *really* hoping that in the future, Apple is going to provide upgraded facilities for package management. My dream is that one day we'll have a utility that will analyze our system and all the little customizations we've made and get a full analysis, and the ability to easily turn things on and off... just like good old Extensions Manager, but universal.