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Porting Unix Command-Line Tools to Mac OS X
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple has posted a technote on porting Unix programs to Mac OS X. Nothing earth-shattering, but nice to see it all collected."
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Why don't they just do it their selves and add more value to their "distro"? They could easly take all the popular GNU tools and port them to Darwin. Then we wouldn't need to use fink.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
In porting unix command-line or non-command-line tools to OS X?
attract unix users to that sweet os? or make powerful also sweet applications out of these unix tools? do you really think they , mac users , will accustom them to m4 , groff , epn etc or anything built upon them?
I think UNIX and OS?(number,X,whatever) are two fundamentally different ways of doing OSs and so it is with their user group.
KOS-MOS
You seem to think this story represents some kind of "move" that it does not. I'm guessing you're not all that familiar with OS X. Fro example, there is no "hiding" of the command line. There's an application called "Terminal" that, when launched, gives you a standard tcsh command line. It no more "hidden" than their "add a printer" utility.
I recommend you try OS X sometime. You might like it. At the very least you'll understand a little more than it's a bona fide Unix operating system and hasn't been "dumbed down" as you seem to imply.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
The reason I use OS X is basicly because I have access to the UNIX command-line tools and I can usually easily port them to OS X. OS X has a nice set of application that are comericalially available Like Photoshop (I know the gimp is close but Photoshop works better for me) so I can do my Unix stuff at the command line and have access to some good comerical software. It is like having the best of both worlds. That and sometimes having the ability to pipe information is really good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It used BSD tools, not GNU tools.
Deal with it.
It hides the command line about as much as a KDE system hides the command line
Open the terminal app and there's a BSD command line/Open Konsole and there's a Linux command line
Login to a console instead of Aqua and there's a command line/Login to a console instead of XFree86 and there's a command line
Have you noticed that Apple tends to only include highly-polished software? There's a reason they built their own KHTML based browser, rather than just porting Konqueror. They have really high standards for the usability of their software, so any non-command-line tool would need to be entirely redesigned to fit their standards, which introduces a lot of work.
Even for command-line programs, once Apple releases something themselves, they implicitly take responsibility for it. If they start doing half-assed ports, then their whole "it just worked" thing goes down the tubes because if their stuff doesn't work, people will hold it against them. They'd probably have to carefully QA every port they did in extensive detail, and that would be expensive. Then there's technical support, maintaining the ports, etc.
There's lots of stuff I'd like to see built into darwin, but I can understand why it isn't really their priority. As has been pointed out, most people who need additional command-line tools can get them themselves and I think apple would rather put their energy into making the tools they do have easier to use by building helpful GUI front-ends for those of us who either don't know how to use unix well, or just find it a lot less enjoyable.