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Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces
Mr. Quick writes "From Metapkg, "In order to better provide freely-available software to users of Mac OS X and Darwin, we Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts commit ourselves to work together." A unified front for free software on Mac OS X is something that was needed."
NetBSD's pkgsrc works very well for me on OSX. I haven't tried portage or darwin ports, but fink seemed a little strange....almost but not quite debian goodness.
Still, I think all this work is kind of weird. I can see the porting effort for things like the text-based things (emacs!) and the very large projects (OO.o!)....but running standard unix apps under X on top of OSX doesn't take advantage of OSX's strong points. For all the hype, this could be happening with people on cygwin....
Kudos to the GNUMail.app people, of showing what can be done.
Apple is more or less part of the darwinports project (Jordan K Hubbard is one of its project leads)
Donate free food here
Thanks to new gpl qt, kde is already running even better than the X11 version. But the port of gtk for os exists, but it is poor and unlike qt, it dosent look like aqua.
Go here for more info. Droooooooooooooool. ;-)
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
> You need to emerge rsync quite a few times during a new install to ensure you are using the latest version of portage.
This isn't true. You run it once and it actually runs rsync, giving you the latest version of portage.
>The FreeBSD ports system on the other hand are just simple tcsh scripts.
Gentoo's ebuilds are simple Bash scripts.
>You need to emerge rsync quite a few times
/etc/defaults/make.conf you can specify /etc/make.conf . Furthermore, there is a script called mirrorselect ('emerge mirrorselect'), which makes finding the fastest mirrors and updating make.conf, all automatically, even easier.
> during a new install to ensure you are using
> the latest version of portage.
I'd have to disagree here. Unless your 'emerge world' takes more than a week, it isn't likely that there will be new ebuilds out. And even in that case, it is probably a matter of a new revision of an ebuild, rather than a new version of the software.
>Under
> which mirrors to use for popular ports or you
> can type in the closest FreeBSD ftp site and
> over-ride it for the fastest download speed.
I don't know when the last time you used portage was, but you _can_ specify mirrors to use in
my $.05
You already can: Behold NetBSD's Packages Collection. Use it on NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, Irix, Darwin, Mac OS X...
More details here.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive." "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
What's really funny about this is that I'm compiling right now as I write this! Somehow it's not stopping me from doing anything.
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs." "Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
Never used gentoo huh? There is no graphical installer for gentoo.
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." "I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
It is faster. The proof is in the pudding and I've tried it on two different machines with the same outcome. You could recompile every RPM if you wanted to but why? Gentoo is built from the ground up. There is another thing too, it's called prelinking!
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..." "...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
So that makes you a better person with a better arguement? This doesn't even belong in the discussion.
"All the other distros are soooo out of date." "Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
I've got a bleeding edge gentoo box, although it's not -O9 (O as in Optimization, not 0 you fool), and it has never crashed.
I could go on and on for every one of these cases but that's not the point. The poing is that everytime some idiot bashes gentoo he is bashing Linux and it does none of us any good. Who cares what distro you use? Use the one that suits you. I like gentoo for many reasons but I don't care if someone else uses or likes a different distro. Gentoo is just suffereing like everything else from it's popularity. You can argue all you want about how popular it is but the fact that there are so many anti-gentoo zealots goes to show that there's enough users to impact others who don't use gentoo.
Time makes more converts than reason
Jordan Hubbard wrote FreeBSD's port system (based mostly off bsd .mk files, not just tcsh scripts), which was then ported to NetBSD and OpenBSD. He's never been happy with it, so he wrote the OpenDarwin port system, based off tcl scripts.
:-)
Just nitpicking.