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Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces

Posted by michael on from the darfinkgen dept.

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."

8 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. how it will work by porkface · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fink has always provided a user-friendly approach to installing ports that appeals to even sub power-users. Darwin ports brings to the table the experience behind the BSD ports system as well as the leadership of Apple. Gentoo brings some hardcore technical muscle. They all bring different strengths to the table, so I think they'll find a way to make it great.

  2. Re:Coordination in Open Source development. by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I think most people don't understand how unique this initiative is.

    Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it.

    Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.

    How do you explain that then?

    It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.

    Sure, it's all good. I still don't understand how they intend to reduce duplication when using different packaging systems and different sources though. If we have packages A and B in fink and gentoo, but they both depend on package C, which network gets to "hold" package C? How do you interface emerge to apt? How do they synchronize the metadata between these two large bodies of packages? In the cases where there already is duplication, who gets to keep the package?

    Lots of unanswered questions here. Will be interesting to find out the answers.

  3. Re:Aren't they forgetting someone? by axxackall · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps in cygwin and native win32 apps at the same time is one of the best features of cheap x86 boxen.

    I think that spending resources and efforts on the platform, which keeps only about 5% in US (and much less outside), is insane. It would be much better to port Portage to cygwin and thus to introduce many windows users with the best packager in the world.

    Consider this: how many users can run how many commercial native OSX applications? Now, how many users can run how many commercial native win32 applications? Porting Portage to Cygwin will give you a corporate market, while porting Portage to OSX will give you just few more geeks.

    --

    Less is more !
  4. the benefits should be obvious by zojas · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The common problem they share is getting every piece of software to compile & run correctly on OS X. They can obviously pool their talents (and patches) to attack the porting of the software.

    each group simply provides their own set of software for installing and maintaining the ported software on your OS X system. They get to share & distribute the hard work of actually porting the packages. Then everyone benefits, regardless of which package manager you choose.

  5. Re:Uh.. so by pete-classic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a huge amount of overlap in those three "codebases." Recall that we are talking about user packages here, and not the system . . . the system is OSX.

    All three are maininging OSX ports of, say, wget and grep and such. All three port packages to OSX. I think this is a huge win for Free Software on this platform.

    But maybe I'm wrong. I have no interest in OSX so this is my POV from the outside looking in.

    -Peter

  6. Good Timing, GenFinDar by JavaJoint · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The timing of this announcement is no accident. Think of WWDC starting on Monday. The eyes of the tech press will be firmly fixed on Moscone Center in San Francisco; at least on the first day.

    So what better time to put forth the story "we can offer Unix/Linux apps from different sources, and do it in a way where we aren't stepping on each others toes!"

    This is a really positive step.

  7. What about Apple? by seanthenerd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What does Apple (the company) itself think of all this? I suppose it could see it as an advantage, more apps for it's OS, but they might also see it as more competition. Strange that nobody has said anything about Apple yet, considering that it's http://apple.slashdot.org/!

  8. Re:Aren't they forgetting someone? by macmurph · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to a recent Forbes Magazine, %10 of the worlds computers are Macintoshes. Dont confuse sales figures with the installed base. Macs dont need to be replaced as often as PCs.

    %.000001 of the worlds computers are running cygwin. Thats probably a generous guess too.

    How many users can run how many commercial native OSX applications? Now, how many users can run how many commercial native win32 applications?

    Consider this: it does me no good that there are half a million windows apps when the seven programs I really need and want only run on OSX.