DarwinPorts Project Crosses 1000 Ports Mark

Soroths writes "The DarwinPorts project just achieved a new milestone at crossing the 1000 ports mark in its quest to bring the world of Open Source Software to the Mac OS X platform. Let's give them support and check the main site for more information about the entire project, including how to join!"

Comments

don't forget the unofficial mirror

[ubiquitin]

see: darwinports.com.

Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror

[sinistral]

FYI, this is *not* a mirror, and it is not affiliated in anyway with the DarwinPorts project. The official website is here.

Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror

[jasonsingha]

The problem with both fink and darwinports is that they need to download the source code from dozens of different mirrors *which all seem to have serious bandwidth problems*. I'm lucky to get a mirror that will give me more than 10K/s and so both fink and darwinports are just plain painful to use. When I used to use Redhat linux, I never had problems getting RPMs at a decent speed though maybe even that has changed. I just wish Apple would use the same mojo they used for the iTunes music store to allow me to download free software that will run on my Mac at something reasonable like 150K/s.

Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror

[javax]

All sources are mirrored on the opendarwin servers which should have plenty of bandwidth - sponsored by Apple and ISC.

Darwin isn't only for OSX.

[BrookHarty]

[snip]The DarwinPorts Project's main goal is to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on a Darwin, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or Linux system.[/snip]

This is really a good idea, a centralized ports collection for multiple os's. Really, with automatic build checking, you can stay up2date on all your OS's.

Re:Good News, But

[lpangelrob2]

From what I remember reading when OpenOffice 1.2 came out, and after a cursory examination of the Mac Porting Page... the answer is "Not for a long, long time."

The decision was, in the long run, it's just not worth trying to get OpenOffice 1.x to Aqua. The development time is better spent on OpenOffice 2.0. Hey, they have better estimates on the work it takes to do that than I would. :-)

So anyways, to actually answer the question, I quote from the site: August 18, 2003: Development of OpenOffice.org 1.x on Mac OS X has been limited to X11. All development of Quartz and Aqua versions has been postponed to OpenOffice.org 2.x with expected delivery in late 2005 to early 2006. See the timeline for details.

Re:Good News, But

[phatsharpie]

I am not sure what is the native build of OpenOffice the previous poster was referring to, but I am assuming he is referring to this.

NeoOffice:
http://www.neooffice.org/

As far as I know, it's still in experimental stages, and I have not used it. So it probably isn't fair to compare it to a release build of OpenOffice.

-B

An alternative..

[nadavspi]

An alternative to DarwinPorts, is Fink, which uses debian tools (apt-get, dkpg).
The package database indexing is a little screwed right now, so I can't give an exact number of packages..
but there are at least 500 packages in stable, and at least 300 in testing (It's rising as I type this..)
It has the usual stuff, including KDE and Gnome2.4

Re:An alternative..

[nadavspi]

Well, I've only used fink myself - it was bigger than Darwinports when I started using it.
It still is, to quote MacNN (april 2003): "DarwinPorts currently has 350+ ports in its tree, while Fink has 2,300+."
Here is also an O'Reilly review of both Darwinports and Fink. It is also from April 2003, but it does cover both systems and their advantages fairly well.

Another interesting project (which I do not know too much about) is Metapkg, an alliance between Fink, DarwinPorts, and Gentoo established to
"facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X."
To quote the June 2003 announcement of Metapkg:

While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way, the coordination between projects will:

• accelerate the development efforts of all projects
• avoid unwanted duplication of effort
• improve the consistency, quality, and responsiveness of ports

Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3)

[WasterDave]

I'm not the first to say it, but if this seems interesting, you should try fink. I had it on my old 10.2 machine and spent a chunk of this morning installing it onto my 10.3 machine and had a few hassles. Words to the wise:

* Install the X11 SDK since lots of things need it to build against. Do this *first*. It's on the XCode disk, or the file you're looking to download is X11SDK.pkg.

* Then just use the binary installer to get Fink going. 19 meg and worth every byte.

Also, use Sao's place as a quick reference.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3)

[trouser]

Fink doesn't contaminate your OS install. It installs everything in /sw. To remove it just 'rm -rf /sw'.

I tried installing OpenDarwin once. It put things where you'd expect them to go (/usr/lib; /usr/bin; etc.), often overwriting what was already there. In my case this was a disaster.

I like the way fink does things. The only time it has broken the problems were caused by major Apple software updates changing the system around Fink. eg. new versions of gcc and libc when upgrading to Jaguar.