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

Good News, But

[luigi22_]

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.

Re:Good News, But

[BrookHarty]

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?

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

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:Darwin isn't only for OSX.

[T-Punkt]

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.

Re:Darwin isn't only for OSX.

[MrChuck]

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).

Dearth of commentary on this..

[morelife]

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.

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..

[pldms]

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.

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)

[SamHill]

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.

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.

Re:Fink (plus advice for fink on 10.3)

[trouser]

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

They Cheated!

[arglesnaf]

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

Soo.....

[bfg9000]

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

Looks like DarwinPorts needs to switch db's

[jocknerd]

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?

Found this last weekend

[Pope]

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.