DarwinPorts Now Available as a .dmg

MitsuMirage writes "From Apple's ADC mailing list: 'OpenDarwin.org has released DarwinPorts 1.0 to provide an easy way to install various open source software products on the Darwin OS family (OpenDarwin, Mac OS X and Darwin). Version 1.0 features about 2500 completed ports.'"

Comments

Inevitable "fink vs" post

[WasterDave]

So, can someone in the know tell me why I might want to use darwin ports over fink?

A little background: I switched from FreeBSD to Linux (Debian) a few years back purely for the ease of patching. I don't go for this compile from source shit at all and would far rather be receiving the same binaries as everyone else in 1/100th the time. So when I heard that the FreeBSD ports concept was being moved to Apple I was, like, "blah" and continued using Fink. A bit.

Why on earth would I want to use darwin ports? I just don't get it.

Dave

Shoe horns

[TheRaven64]

All of these systems seem to be trying to shoe-horn UNIX-style packages onto OS X, which seems to be to be incredibly messy. When I compile any UNIX software on OS X, I set the prefix to /opt/{package name}, and install each package in its own subdirectory of /opt (and I have a section in my .bashrc which adds /opt/*/bin to my path). This way, I can deal with UNIX software in exactly the same way as OS X applications. I would like to see UNIX software for OS X distributed as .tar.bz files that expand to a single directory that can be placed anywhere desired. Ideally, I would also like dependencies to be checked at run-time, and automatically fetched if required.

Re:Shoe horns

[TheRaven64]

The Darwin linker is pretty advanced, and has no problems at all with simple features like modifying the library search path. Also, OS X has had a searchfs[1] system call which, even pre-spotlight, was capable of finding files incredibly fast. I would:

1. Check whether the libraries exist at their default path. If so, run.
2. If not, use searchfs or spotlight to find them. If this succeeds, store the result, and launch.
3. Otherwise, fetch them from the Internet, install, and then run. [1] Documentation (man pages) for searchfs is not included with OS X, however it can be downloaded from the Apple developers' site.

What's a battle?

[ockegheim]

You should add /opt/local/bin (or wherever you chose to install DarwinPorts) to your shell's path.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" or a Bourne shell (bash, zsh), add the following line to your ~/.profile:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

This is exactly the sort of thing I come up against each and every time I get excited about running Unix software on my Mac. I fear the gap between my knowledge of Unix basics, and what I need to know to ever do anything useful will never be bridged.