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DarwinPorts Project Crosses 1000 Ports Mark

Posted by pudge on from the that-be-a-heap-load-of-ports dept.

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!"

52 comments

  1. Good News, But by luigi22_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    when will we get a port of Open Office that runs natively and not on X11? That will truly be a good day for all.

    --
    On /., first you get the karma, then you get the power, then you get the women.
    1. Re:Good News, But by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Just think how much karma you'd earn if you worked on that.

    2. Re:Good News, But by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Me like karma. Me work on Oo.org and get much karma.

    3. Re:Good News, But by 11223 · · Score: 0

      Obviously you haven't googled, because it does exist. And it runs quite nicely.

    4. Re:Good News, But by BrookHarty · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I couldnt find the native openoffice build for OSX, anyone have the url? The only openoffice build I have is under fink. I did a google, is it a closed beta maybe?

    5. Re:Good News, But by lpangelrob2 · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

      --
      -Rob
      Marriage doesn't have to suck!
    6. Re:Good News, But by phatsharpie · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    7. Re:Good News, But by luigi22_ · · Score: 0

      That's more or less it. I wanted to know when Oo could be made to run on OSX without X11. Why was my post modded offtopic?

      --
      On /., first you get the karma, then you get the power, then you get the women.
  2. don't forget the unofficial mirror by ubiquitin · · Score: 2, Informative

    see: darwinports.com.

    --
    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
    1. Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror by sinistral · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    2. Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror by nocomment · · Score: 1

      I was gonna say "How good can it be if it doesn't even have Kolf?", but then I went to the unofficial link and it's there! Maybe I will give Darwin another try. I tried it back at 0.6.

      --
      /* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
      /* http://allyourbasearebelongto.us */
    3. Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror by jasonsingha · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror by javax · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    5. Re:don't forget the unofficial mirror by danigiri · · Score: 1

      Ummmm... lemme chirp in.

      Back in Europe 10K(i-assume-bytes)/s is a fairly reasonable speed for a long sustained download. Yeah I am in DSL.

      Are you willing to pay a "reasonable" price for the bandwith costs associated with the "reasonable" speed downloads of 150KB/s? No, and I do not mean at your end only.

  3. This obviously means the project is dying by b00m3rang · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    After all, FreeBSD is dying, and they've got 10 times more ports. These guys must really have one foot in the grave.

    1. Re:This obviously means the project is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait



      After all, FreeBSD is dying, and they've got 10 times more ports. These guys must really have one foot in the grave.

      Get it right!!

      FreeBSD is dying
      Apple is bleagured

  4. About time. by revolvement · · Score: 1, Funny

    I for one welcome our OSS porting overlords

    1. Re:About time. by javax · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      In Soviet Russia Darwin ports YOU!

  5. Darwin isn't only for OSX. by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Informative

    [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.

    1. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by T-Punkt · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The NetBSD package system beats that:
      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.

    2. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by javax · · Score: 1

      probably for the number of operating systems, but not on the number of ports available for Darwin/MacOS-X...

    3. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by MrChuck · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I have to concur. I've used pkgsrc (netbsd's word for "ports" cause "port" to netbsd means netbsd on a new hardware platform - so same as "port" for free/open users)... where was I? Ah: I've used pkgsrc on NetBSD for years. I'm now using it on Solaris, MacOS X and Linux.

      *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).

    4. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by T-Punkt · · Score: 1

      I really doubt that. As of january, there were 4380 packages in the tree. Even if half of them don't compile on Darwin that's more than twice as much as DarwinPorts offers.

    5. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do people like you do anything other than bitch? Seriously. It seems like every other day, some NetBSD weenie is bitching about how pkgsrc is great, pkgsrc is cross-platform, and why won't the world switch to pkgsrc instead of trying to solve the problems again.

      Maybe (gee wizz), this is because pkgsrc hasn't solved any useful problems, it's just yet-another-make-based ports system, with the added avantage of being portable.

    6. Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX. by javax · · Score: 1

      NetBSDs way of making ports is e. g. making a py21, py22-, py23- version of every python module, making a -ssl, -nox, -x11 variant of everything; this bloats up the package count a little bit. DarwinPorts doesn't do that - they have a system that lets you specifiy variants on the port. (the *BSD Makefiles have something like this _sometimes_ too) If counting the number of packages that you could make from Darwinports stuff would clearly be larger by factor 4.

  6. Dearth of commentary on this.. by morelife · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hm. 1000 is a number, by itself meaningless except to the porters. Would like to know more about the quality of the ports so far as it would influence my decision as to whether to buy a G5 or not.

    Why not more on the class action lawsuit against Apple?? Far more substantial of a topic.

    1. Re:Dearth of commentary on this.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1. It's old news.

      2. The people behind the lawsuit are full of shit.

    2. Re:Dearth of commentary on this.. by pudge · · Score: 1

      I agree on both counts; if there were something new, though, I'd post it. Just yesterday someone submitted a link to an article from this week that said, there were class action lawsuits filed against Apple in December! Ooooooo.

  7. An alternative.. by nadavspi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:An alternative.. by commodoresloat · · Score: 1

      Is there any advantage to fink over darwinports or vice versa? I had fink installed under 10.2 but it stopped working a long time ago and I deleted it. I just installed 10.3; which would be a better choice at this stage of development?

    2. Re:An alternative.. by pldms · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I just tried a little shell script over the fink unstable tree. I get 1474 packages currently (updated a couple of days ago).

      That's excluding dupes, of course, but including variants like X and X-ssl (very uncommon). Libraries are only counted once (i.e. no -dev -shlibs double counting) since they correspond to one .info.

      --
      Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
      me a number based on the order in which I joined
    3. Re:An alternative.. by nadavspi · · Score: 5, Informative
      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
  8. How about OpenDarwin? by Endive4Ever · · Score: 1

    I've installed Darwin on both Beige G3 boxes and on an Intel box or two. The X system works fine. But I miss the large ports collection that exists for NetBSD.

    I am not really interested in purchasing a copy of Mac OSX, nor investing in the kind of hardware needed to run it.

    Will there be good support in DarwinPorts for machines not running OSX? It would be a great thing if there was something similar to Zoularis (the cross-platform effort to get the NetBSD packages collection running on Solaris and other non-NetBSD systems)? I'd like to think if Darwin is real and not just an Open Source veneer, that DarwinPorts will include OpenDarwin system support, at least to a degree.

    --
    ---
    1. Re:How about OpenDarwin? by javax · · Score: 1

      have a look at the url of the homepage: "darwinports.opendarwin.org" - DarwinPorts is part of OpenDarwin, the pure open source version of Darwin, w/o any whistles from MacOS-X.

  9. i dunno by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    That GNU-Darwin people decides not to link to proprietary libraries is, of course, a result of them using the GNU Public License so extensively and now because of that decision the primary Darwin development platform is no longer supported in this project!

    This makes me shake my head and wonder what the fuck? This project is not only shooting itself in the foot by choosing a platform not fully supported by the OS, but is also screwing over the real meat of Darwin's userbase: PowerPC owners. This move is akin to opening a car garage (in America) whose mechanics are all experienced in servicing American cars, and then changing policy months later, stating that the garage will only work on foreign models.

    Where is the fucking logic?

    Seriously, am I the only one who is wondering who the Hell is in charge at that project? Kool-Aid Man? This move makes so little sense I can't tell if the people at GNU-Darwin are really that stupid, or if I am waking up in alternate realities every damn morning. I almost kind of hope for the latter.

    This is the GPL in action, Mac faithful. Get down on your knees and kiss Apple's butt for choosing the BSD license.

    1. Re:i dunno by notsoclever · · Score: 0, Troll

      Aww man, do I hafta? I just finished kissing Apple's butt for Panther.

      --
      There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
  10. Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by WasterDave · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
    1. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by SamHill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by trouser · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Now wash your hands.
    3. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by trouser · · Score: 2, Interesting

      oops, it may have been GNUDarwin that I had problems with. I don't recall. OK, something broke my system real bad.

      --
      Now wash your hands.
    4. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by OmniVector · · Score: 1, Troll

      i'm sorry, but that's just bs. i've written several darwinports, and the maintainers are very strict about adhereing to directory polices.

      --
      - tristan
    5. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      gnudarwin is a wank. they just take the hard work of the awesome people at OD, burn their own CDs, and profit.

    6. Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3) by Leimy · · Score: 1

      Wow that's really not the case at all. Darwinports by default installs stuff to /opt/local so it doesn't do what you just described. I suppose asking people to check their facts before posting to slashdot.org is too much work though.

      Now you have an "informative" post with false information in it. Good job :)

  11. They Cheated! by arglesnaf · · Score: 5, Funny

    The last 14 ports were all versions of "Hello World!" in various scripting languages...

  12. -1 off topic by FredFnord · · Score: 1

    So what does this have to do with darwin ports, then?

    -fred

    --
    Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
  13. Soo..... by bfg9000 · · Score: 2, Funny

    So who's gonna port some Mac software to Linux?

    --

    I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."

    1. Re:Soo..... by pogma · · Score: 1

      You?

    2. Re:Soo..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The moderation of your question as "funny" is both deserved and disturbing. There will never be any organized (corporate) efforts to "free" software or to provide it to those who use free OSes. The Powers That Be(TM) desire only to move software from the realm of the free to the proprietary OSes, thus giving another reason NOT to use free software. NOBODY entrenched in the current system wants Linux to have more apps; that would loosen the stranglehold proprietary OSes have on the market and be an incentive to switch to an open, free system. And without the stranglehold, profits would plummet to normal levels as software prices are forced to become reasonable again. Apple, for example, would have to compete in the hardware arena again. And against Dell, IBM, Sony, and HP, they would lose. Their strategy is to sell boutique products at premium prices. Nobody would pay a premium for Macs if iLife, etc. wasn't Mac-only. Apple would be beleaguered again, and would have to put out recent hardware in order to stay alive. They'd still have the advantage of style, but users would demand a video card from this Century in their notebooks. Right now, they SETTLE for what they can get because they want the iApps and OSX. When Linux duplicates all the ease-of-use and prettiness of OSX, Apple's powerful draw will wane, and competition (and choice) will be reborn.

      In other words, the bubble would burst. And nobody wants that. Fuck economics. Fuck competition. Fuck struggle. Fuck the customer. Let him pay more and receive less. That's the proprietary way. Linux will change all that. You will pay less and get more, and because of massive cross-hardware functionality, your only choice will be between a Darth Vader-looking ThinkPad, or a Matrix-looking PowerBook. The same software will run on everything. NOTE: It'll be great when Linux finally takes over and becomes the fair, open, standard OS. All the apps will be written for it, and the lack of a monopolistic company owning, controlling, and manipulating the platform that everybody else writes for will spur competition and innovation in awesome new ways. Apps will still be sold, but for a free platform. Lockins will be a thing of the past (mostly).

      THIS IS PROGRESS. THE FREE SOFTWARE/OPEN SOURCE METHODOLOGY IS PROGRESS.

      It *will* happen eventually -- global market forces will ensure that Linux, or another free OS, eventually "wins" (as well it should), but North America will be the LAST to admit defeat, as we have the most to lose; tax revenues, jobs, materials purchased, transportation costs, advertising, legal fees(!), etc. The Free Software model is so much more efficient than the current standard that, if allowed to grow unchecked, it will radically reshape our economy. For the better, but that's irrelevent. Rapid or large change is bad for business. The status quo is good.

      So NO, there will be NO efforts to port Mac software over to Linux until there is huge economic pressure (ie market demand) to do so. And even then, it will be grudgingly. Nobody wants to support multiple platforms, and nobody wants to use cross-platform tools. Well, the Opera guys are an exception....

      p.s. the big news in Canada today is that former Microsoft lobbyists are now working directly as Prime Minister Paul Martin's personal technology advisors. How sorrowful is that....

    3. Re:Soo..... by bfg9000 · · Score: 1

      Ah, hell, it was worth a try!

      --

      I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."

    4. Re:Soo..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMEN, Brother. The opening up of software into a standard worldwide open platform is inevitable. I just hope it'll be sooner than later. Thank God Linux is viral and a cancer.

  14. Looks like DarwinPorts needs to switch db's by jocknerd · · Score: 2, Funny

    Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /Library/WebServer/Documents/projects/darwinports/ includes/functions.inc on line 12
    Can't connect to db!

    How about PostgreSQL guys?

  15. Found this last weekend by Pope · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I was looking for an .OGM demuxer to see if I could make a DVD out of some episodes of "Look Around You." The only thing I had found previously was some weird hack that involved Windows (meaning using Virtual PC, and slowing everything to a crawl) and renaming the thing to .AVI. Cheesy!

    So, I found the Darwinports site, grabbed, installed, and voila! OMGTools in a very quick and easy fashion.

    --
    It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.