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.