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!"
It can be used on Darwin, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and SunOS, see here.
mk-files for BSDOS and AIX are also present in the tree, so either the documentation is not up to date or support for those systems isn't finished yet.
*WHY* would I want yet another port project?
What advantage does this one give us? Less filling? Tastes great? better ego fullfillment?
I'm a long time BSD user (used it on vaxen in the 80s) and as much as I enjoy a rift for the sake of a rift ... can't we stop wasting time doing the same work over and over and perhaps get ONE ports/pkgsrc project going and working well?
Is there a complelling reason for opendarwin over, say, pkgsrc (which is much more established as a cross platform tool with over 4300 packages done).
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I played with Fink, I got the impression that the developers didn't quite ``get'' Debian, and didn't quite get the BSD ports system, either. The result was kind of clunky and frustrating for people familiar with either inspirational ancestor.
DarwinPorts, on the other hand, does pretty much what I want it to do without contaminating my OS install. I'd still probably prefer a signed binary package system (if you're just trying something, having to wait for it to both download and build is annoying), but it works well enough for what I've used it for.