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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Apple

Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces 164

Posted by michael from the darfinkgen dept.
Mr. Quick writes "From Metapkg, "In order to better provide freely-available software to users of Mac OS X and Darwin, we Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts commit ourselves to work together." A unified front for free software on Mac OS X is something that was needed."
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Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces More

Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces

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  • Name for the United Front? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TPIRman ( 142895 ) * on Saturday June 21, 2003 @03:47AM (#6260529)
    What will this new collaboration be called?

    DarFinkGen?
    FinkTooWin?

    Firebird?

  • Uh.. so (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @03:49AM (#6260537)
    So while this is really cool, how is it going to work out?

    To wit: thought maybe i'm on crack, it SEEMS like each of the three-- while offering basically the same interface to the same service-- were pegged to different codebases, and taking packages from different sources. Fink to debian, gentoo to gentoo and ports to bsd.

    Is this the case? And which source (debian/gentoo/bsd) will the collaboration generally follow?

    • Re:Uh.. so (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pete-classic ( 75983 )
      There is a huge amount of overlap in those three "codebases." Recall that we are talking about user packages here, and not the system . . . the system is OSX.

      All three are maininging OSX ports of, say, wget and grep and such. All three port packages to OSX. I think this is a huge win for Free Software on this platform.

      But maybe I'm wrong. I have no interest in OSX so this is my POV from the outside looking in.

      -Peter
    • From what I understand, the Gentoo portage system atleast, is quite powerful in decidig which ports are available and which are pulled in to be compiled. Something as simple as a flag in make.conf could be used to decide what source packages to use.

    • If they just learned to read each others install lists, and how to check for what was installed via normal packages, then they could keep their seperate codebases.

      The OS is Darwin. Lots of different codebases can use it. The real challenge is managing the classic Unix problem of ensuring everyone gets the right version of shared dynamic libraries.

  • "While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way"


    Perfect, this means we dont have to scrap Fink or Gentoo for a new system, we can use the ones we already have.

  • This is what Linux needs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...to come together like this. The competing GUI's (KDE vs. GNOME), the competing browswers (Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera, Galeon), the competing distributions (SuSe, RH, Caldera), all drain human and financial resources that, if combined would make Linux into the powerhouse it could be.

    Until then, Linux will remain second fiddle to the likes of Windows XP and MacOS X.

    • Re:This is what Linux needs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HornyBastard77 ( 667965 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:08AM (#6260583)
      Yes indeed. Get them all together. Package them all the same. Get rid of choice, it is overrated anyway. That is the only way to get Linux to be just like Windows, and the OSI, FSF et al to be like just like MS.

      • Re:This is what Linux needs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 90XDoubleSide ( 522791 ) <ninetyxdoubleside.hailmail@net> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:27AM (#6260625)
        These group's aren't merging into one project: they're still making three products, but will be working together to ensure there is sharing of work and no duplication of effort. This is indeed different from most OSS projects where the two competitiors come to hate each other for some reason. Another groundbreaking thought from their mission statement: "Non-advocacy: Our common goal is simply to provide software for people who choose to use Mac OS X & Darwin, not to promote or advocate any particular operating system." OSS with non-advocacy! Imagine how much more acceptance open-source software might get if everyone focused on telling people how the development model could produce great software at no cost to the user instead of droning on about how it is immoral for programmers to serve as wage-labor.
        • I agree. My comment wasn't in response to Fink/Gentoo/DarwinPorts working together. It was in response to this:

          This is what Linux needs... ...to come together like this. The competing GUI's (KDE vs. GNOME), the competing browswers (Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera, Galeon), the competing distributions (SuSe, RH, Caldera), all drain human and financial resources that, if combined would make Linux into the powerhouse it could be.

          Until then, Linux will remain second fiddle to the likes of Windows XP and MacOS X.

      • You make it sound like Linux has to "catch-up" with windows :)

      • Re:This is what Linux needs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Idimmu Xul ( 204345 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @05:08AM (#6260699) Homepage Journal
        What choices would you be losing if that happened? They same software would still be available, and you would still beable to do the same thing with it, e.g. install it from packages, install from source packages, roll your own from a tar ball.

        The only thing that I can see that you'd lose is the multitude of different ways things can be configured. e.g. is the httpd.conf in /etc/apache /etc/httpd /var/www/conf or somewhere else? etc etc

        Where is the choice between GNOME and KDE when you have to have both installed anyway to beable to use all the decent apps avilable to Linux?
      • How on earth is this 'Insightful'? Seriously? Where's the insight?

        This is not about removing choice, it's about removing incompatibility. You know, the thing that Slashdot is always harping on MS about? By promoting compatibility, it will make it easier to use, and unless it's easier to use, no one will want to use it.

        Remember, we're dealing with OS X here - the users in question are people who appreciate simplicity that just works, without having to screw around with it. Why would I spend three thousand
    • Wrong. Competition is great and leads to better results.

      The main reason why Linux is behind in the desktop is missing reliable Win32 compatibility. Usability sure is not perfect but certainly on par with WinXP (WinXP is not perfect either.)

      Everywhere, where Win32 compatibility is not needed (on servers, on embedded systems) Linux is very strong.

    • Re:This is what Linux needs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SilentMajority ( 674573 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @05:31AM (#6260725) Homepage
      There are pros & cons to this.

      The drawbacks to having fragmented marketshare (like KDE & GNOME) is sometimes--but not always--outweighed by the improvements caused by having strong competition.

      Look at the drastic improvements MS IE received while Netscape was still a strong contender. Then look at the improvements after IE got 90%+ marketshare. Some would argue that there isn't much to add to a browser but a look at the innovations in Opera, Mozilla Firebird and Safari.

      Rather than consolidation, I'd rather see competing products like KDE & Gnome come up with common standards. For example, KDE & Gnome could come up with very specific & consistent user interface standards and adhere to them in their products.

      Microsoft did a great job (compared to Linux) in not only coming up with Windows UI standards but in preaching it: the vast majority of Windows apps writting by diverse vendors has a FILE, EDIT, HELP, etc. menu and they are rather consistent in their content too. CONSISTENCY IS IMPORTANT.

      I'd like to see Linux be different where it counts: like stabiliy, security, open standards, Unix-like shell & filesystem, etc. But I don't see the point of being different for its own sake (like throwing out MS Windows GUI/UI guidelines so that 95% of pc users will find it less desirable to switch to Linux).

      My apologies if such a GUI/UI standard exists--I simply don't see it being promoted or used in X apps I've tried--and it was just an example.

      • Re:This is what Linux needs (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @09:12AM (#6261187) Journal
        The drawbacks to having fragmented marketshare (like KDE & GNOME) is sometimes--but not always--outweighed by the improvements caused by having strong competition.

        The problem is, as you point out later, inconsistancy. You can't troubleshoot Linux nearly as easily, because you have to say 'Ok, go to the menu with the foot on it, and choose- what? Oh, ok, the menu with the K on it. And then go to, uhh.. let me see, I only ever use Gnome.' Having to know twice as much can interfere ver much with helping someone.

        Rather than consolidation, I'd rather see competing products like KDE & Gnome come up with common standards. For example, KDE & Gnome could come up with very specific & consistent user interface standards and adhere to them in their products.

        As I recall, they agreed to work together on this a while ago. I could be wrong, but it's in the slashdot archives I'm sure.

        Microsoft did a great job (compared to Linux) in not only coming up with Windows UI standards but in preaching it: the vast majority of Windows apps writting by diverse vendors has a FILE, EDIT, HELP, etc. menu and they are rather consistent in their content too. CONSISTENCY IS IMPORTANT.

        Microsoft did a horrible job with their GUI. The standards you mention (File, edit, help) have been around since the early Mac days, and are in a slew of DOS programs too. Microsoft, however, made a lot of very bad design decisions - such as using 'Yes/No/Cancel' or 'OK/Cancel' dialogs whenever a choice needs to be made, instead of properly labelling the buttons with exactly what they do.

        They also don't stress the importance of making one's program follow the same pattern as the 'standard'. Most programs, when you try to close them, have a 'Save? [Yes/No/Cancel]' dialog, but enough of them have an 'Abandon changes? [Yes/No/Cancel]' dialog to make life frustrating for anyone who deals with a wide variety of programs. If you want real UI guidelines, check out the latest ones from Apple. It's a near-religious text.

        I'd like to see Linux be different where it counts: like stabiliy, security, open standards, Unix-like shell & filesystem, etc. But I don't see the point of being different for its own sake (like throwing out MS Windows GUI/UI guidelines so that 95% of pc users will find it less desirable to switch to Linux).

        Linux environment programmers (KDE, GNOME, etc) have three main options. If they copy the Windows behaviour, it'll be familiar to Windows users, but the Windows behaviour makes little sense in a lot of circumstances (See above)

        If they (properly) copy the MacOS behaviour, they will have a system that feels and works properly even to a completely new user, but most people consider it 'wrong' because it's not what they're used to. As such, it will probably never be adopted, since a lot of people refuse to give it a chance.

        If they make their own guidelines, then obviously, they'll have the freedom to make their own standards, which they can tailor to suit their programs. This is bad, but it's what will happen. As evidenced by Sun's usability study, programmers design interfaces for themselves and others, but don't tend to consider what other people are used to or will find intuitive - well, how would they know? It makes sense to the programmers. A lot of programmers consider the UI an 'interface to the user for the code' - a way for the code to get itself run - rather than 'an interface for the user to the code' - a way for the user to make the code do what they want.

        What the GNOME/KDE projects need are clear heirarchies, and priorities. Unfortunately, GTK is such a rabid bitch to code in (compare to Cocoa) and not many programs use Glade, so UI designers have the harsh end of the stick. I also can't help but feel there's a feeling with GNOME programmers that only 'real programming' is beneficial - documentation and UI design can be 'good enough' (docs and UI can never be 'good enough'). If it's there i
      • I pretty much agree with your statements, but I will say this much: I don't think the lack of useful changes you're seeing in IE are strictly due to them achieving a "90% marketshare".

        Honestly, IE wouldn't have dominated so completely if it wasn't a pretty well "finished product". Compared to any version of Netscape I've used, IE is incredibly more stable and reliable. Netscape tends to blow up after only so much use, and can even destabilize an entire OS it runs on top of.

        Many of the "innovative new f
    • Why do these trolls keep getting moderated up to 5 points? Let me go over this again:

      o Duplication of effort, whilst often unecessary, is not the death of Free Software. Maybe some people don't like the code architecture of KDE, and so choose to code for Gtk and GNOME; maybe some people dislike the lack of challenge in approaching Konqueror and so choose to code on Mozilla. It's people's choice, and I see no reason why we should try to force all FS developers to code in particular projects.

      o Many projects
    • Except that this is merely pooling efforts on the porting side, so that one's choice of package management tool won't restrict availability of a given piece of software anymore than one's choice to use PPC Darwin.
    • Linux has things like LSB, the Linux Standard Base.
      All these companies contribute towards one Linux and take THEIR pick out of the applications they support.
      For security they share their insights into what they find.
      You can say a lot about the RedHat GUI but it did stimulate Gnome and KDE to increase their cooperation. My point is, all these companies struggle with the FACT that they have to distinguish themselves while their work IS open source. Everyone can take note (and does) of what they do and can inc
    • My thoughts exactly... I think this is one of the reasons the 3 BSD's are able to accomplish so much despite having a fraction of the developer resources of the Linux community. Although each project is developed independently according to their respective goals, they share their solutions that the others are free to adopt or improve upon.
    • You know what would be an awesome way for the to work together? They should give each other thier source code! Then they'd all always be working on the same page, right?

  • What about Apple? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BibelBiber ( 557179 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @03:53AM (#6260549)
    Since they ported X11 to Mac OS X on their own it would be kinda useful to have them in the same boat. Dont you think?

  • Coordination in Open Source development. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dwerg ( 58450 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:01AM (#6260565) Homepage Journal
    I think most people don't understand how unique this initiative is. Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.

    It's good too see there are some developers out there with organizational talents who are willing to communicate with other projects in order to speed up development time and create a better product.

    • I agree. There is a common bond that the open source community has. Even if people don't agree as to how to get it done, we're going the same place.

      I wonder what teh open Source world would be like if more camps joined forces, and worked together?

    • It's because they're developing for the Mac, so they can Think Different. :P

      Tho' you might think all the stereotypical arty types who use Macs (amongst which I include myself, occasionally) would be more likely to bitch about and compete with others' efforts.

      iqu :D
    • I think most people don't understand how unique this initiative is.

      Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it.

      Most of the times open source projects don't really notice eachother and when they do, they just start a flamewar about who's best and who stole feature from who.

      How do you explain that then? [freedesktop.org]

      It's good too see there are some devel

      • Huh? You realise that the Red Hat apt repositories have been allying with each other for some time, to reduce duplication, overlap and synchronize metadata right? They just don't do press releases for it. Oops, forgot about that. How do you explain that then? I didn't say no-one worked together. Sure, it's all good. I still don't understand how they intend to reduce duplication when using different packaging systems and different sources though. From the website:

        Under this new alliance, the projects

    • I think that the flamewars come more from non-developer users of OSS software rather than from the developers themselves. Take, for example, KDE and GNOME; it's the users that bicker, not the developers. In fact the developers want to work together and port features across. There are some arguments that happen across the camps, but that usually comes from differing philosophies about the UI or just conflicting personalities (which happens with any organization.)

      So, I guess the real question is: why do end users (i.e. people who just use the software and do no development on it) bicker so much? I'm not quite sure, really.
      • So, I guess the real question is: why do end users (i.e. people who just use the software and do no development on it) bicker so much? I'm not quite sure, really.

        Because most of them are 16-year-old linux n00bs who are using social groups to define their own personality.

  • Aren't they forgetting someone? (Score:5, Informative)

    by idiotnot ( 302133 ) * <sean@757.org> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:06AM (#6260576) Homepage Journal
    NetBSD's pkgsrc works very well for me on OSX. I haven't tried portage or darwin ports, but fink seemed a little strange....almost but not quite debian goodness.

    Still, I think all this work is kind of weird. I can see the porting effort for things like the text-based things (emacs!) and the very large projects (OO.o!)....but running standard unix apps under X on top of OSX doesn't take advantage of OSX's strong points. For all the hype, this could be happening with people on cygwin....

    Kudos to the GNUMail.app [collaboration-world.com] people, of showing what can be done.

    • Re:Aren't they forgetting someone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:35AM (#6260639)
      ...but running standard unix apps under X on top of OSX doesn't take advantage of OSX's strong points.

      Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps and native OS X apps at the same time is one of the best features of my OS X boxen. The availability of diverse software from two almost totally separate camps is awesome.
      • Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps in cygwin and native win32 apps at the same time is one of the best features of cheap x86 boxen.

        I think that spending resources and efforts on the platform, which keeps only about 5% in US (and much less outside), is insane. It would be much better to port Portage to cygwin and thus to introduce many windows users with the best packager in the world.

        Consider this: how many users can run how many commercial native OSX applications? Now, how many users can

        • Cygwin is great (I've been running it for years), but there is one fatal problem with it: the underlying OS. For me, running X11 on cygwin (let alone X11 apps) produces the same feeling as trying to quickly pull out a tablecloth from a table that is covered with expensive china.
          • I did not understand your feeling. For me - X11 on cygwin works fine with up-to 3 months uptime and I stop it only when I upgrade cygwin itself or when IT dept insists to shutdown all workstations.
            • For me, X11 on cygwin has always made the hard drive "thrash" much more than normal (normal being an equivalent Linux box), which makes me pretty paranoid while using it...

              Is there a way to run X11 on cygwin as "rootless", or inside of Windows itself? The last time I checked it was full-screen only.
              • On my PC with Cygwin Xfree86 takes CPU only when I start using it. Otherwise it sleeps somewhere in the swap without being noticed.

                And yes, I saw many meesages from Cygwin users about "rootless" X11. However, I prefer it with root: IceWM and nice background, thus I feel when I swtch my attention from one env to another :)

        • According to a recent Forbes Magazine, %10 of the worlds computers are Macintoshes. Dont confuse sales figures with the installed base. Macs dont need to be replaced as often as PCs.

          %.000001 of the worlds computers are running cygwin. Thats probably a generous guess too.

          How many users can run how many commercial native OSX applications? Now, how many users can run how many commercial native win32 applications?

          Consider this: it does me no good that there are half a million windows apps when the seven p
          • My experience lets me to doubt in your numbers. In last few companies I worked last 3 years there were usually 1-3 Macs per whole company, but 5-10 people using Cygwin.

            And if you specifically need just seven programs (let me guess: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, IE, Photoshop and Illustrator, right?), it doesn't mean the other people are like you. Most of people prefer the Windows platform and Windows applications is one of those reasons (PC prices is another big reason). Don't forget, most of good CAD, account

        • The code is all there for your viewing, compiling, and porting pleasure. I suggest you either fire up emacs and start hacking up the cygwin version you want or stop whining about people who are providing the Mac community with some great apps for free.

      • Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps and native OS X apps at the same time is one of the best features of my OS X boxen.

        To quote Chicago, Leonard Nimoy [geocities.com] (for those who don't believe me), R. Kelly, Diana Ross, Paul Oakenfold, Culture Shock, Michael Jackson, Boyz II Men, ATB, Dean Fraser, Lovewar, Modern Talking, Olive, Saga, the Kingsmen Quartet, Michael McLean, and Patty Griffin, "You are not alone". :^)

        (This omniscient post is powered by the AMG All Music Guide [allmusic.com]...)

  • Why not just port GTK/Gnome to MacOS X ? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That why you just compile your favorite GTK/Gnome app and have a native MacOSX app ?

  • how it will work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by porkface ( 562081 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:09AM (#6260585) Journal
    Fink has always provided a user-friendly approach to installing ports that appeals to even sub power-users. Darwin ports brings to the table the experience behind the BSD ports system as well as the leadership of Apple. Gentoo brings some hardcore technical muscle. They all bring different strengths to the table, so I think they'll find a way to make it great.

  • Debian, Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, join forces (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Take the defactoness of rpm
    Take the power of apt-get
    Mix with the strength of emerge.
    And take the ease of use of Mandrake.

    To make a
    One unified linux, with one libc, one X (X 4.4), one desktop environment (KDE 3.2) and one text editor (nano, because ^X is better than :wq).

    The true united linux, ready to take on the real enemeys (SCO, Microsoft).

    The chances of this happening are 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0 0........001%, but we can always dream.
    • One unified linux, with one libc, one X (X 4.4), one desktop environment (KDE 3.2) and one text editor (nano, because ^X is better than :wq)

      One Linux to rule them all, one libc to find them, one X to bring them all and on the Desktop bind them.

    • I'd want Redhat and Mandrake to dispapear from that picture entirely. RPMs are simply beyond redemption at this point for me. Give me Portage or give me death!
    • Since apt is not tied to Debian'd dpkg, there is a version for rpm as well. The downside is of course that not all programs are available from apt/rpm servers. On the other hand, Mandrake has urpmi with very similar functionality.

      I wouldn't rate emerge very high because it's just overkill to compile/optimize everything for current machines. It would be more useful on a slow system, but then it'd take ages to install anything.

      • I sure don't think it's overkill. All of my packages are optimized for my cpu, and thanks to USE flags, I only have the options I want. I want Mozilla, but only the browser, not the mail?

        USE="moznomail" nice emerge mozilla

        Less bloat makes me happy.

        Besides, if you don't like compiling stuff (I typically nice it, my machine is perfectly usable while compiling) there are binary packages for many larger programs such mozilla and openoffice. These take only minutes to emerge.

        • Re: rpm + apt-get (Score:3, Insightful)

          by autechre ( 121980 )
          Or you could have a distribution which has modular packages instead:

          apt-get install mozilla-browser

          I don't have to recompile PHP every time I want to use a different module; I just install whatever modules I want, whenever I want to use them.

          That is the strength of Debian. It's not just apt-get; people who have ported apt to work under Red Hat are moving in the right direction, but that is not the whole problem. With Debian, thousands of packages are "official", and so are quite strictly designed so th
    • Geez thie ONE OF EVERYTHING crap isn't the holy grail or the road to linux dominance.

      I really don't feel like pointing out(for the billionth time) why all the myths I've seen today wrong, but suffice to say get over the fucking idea that "Linux" is ever going to mean ONE THING or that by eliminating all other distros but one is suddenly going to get Joe Consumer interested..

      btw get back to me when Adobe, Jasc, Corel,Broderbund, Macromedia, MGI Software, and Ulead FINALLY have One graphics app, one interfa

  • Excellent news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by harikiri ( 211017 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:54AM (#6260677)
    One of the reasons I've installed Yellow Dog Linux [yellowdoglinux.com] on my iBook (for coding & development) was because it was such a pain having to search across multiple "vendors" of open source ports and packages for Darwin. Depending on which package I installed, I would either have to modify makefiles to use up to three different -L (path's to programming libraries), such as /usr/lib, /sw/lib and /usr/local/lib. It was bloody annoying.

    So I welcome this move towards a unified ports system for Darwin, it was definitely needed.

    • I would either have to modify makefiles to use up to three different -L (path's to programming libraries), such as /usr/lib, /sw/lib and /usr/local/lib. It was bloody annoying.

      So I welcome this move towards a unified ports system for Darwin, it was definitely needed.

      RTFA:

      While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way, [...]

    • I _would_ use it, but I'm really more of a cat person.

      Dogs smell funny.

  • Friends (Score:4, Funny)

    by batobin ( 10158 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:57AM (#6260681) Homepage
    Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts alone are not enough to conquer evil. But with their forces combined, they form *dramatic pause* the league of super best friends.
    • To defeat the forces of evil, these are the entities that make up the Coalition of the Willing. Oh yeah. No more WMD on an Apple box! Woohoo, we're all saved! Re-elect Apple in 2004! :)
    • The allusion is lost on me. Can anyone explain?
      • It's a joke from a south park episode. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, Joseph Smith, and Sea Man form a club called "The Super Best Friends". They fight together against evil (except for Buddha, who doesn't believe in evil).

        It's a spoof of the Justice League (cartoon with Superman, etc.) I think.

  • Why can't they use BSD's system (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:28AM (#6260994) Journal
    kiss= keep it simple stupid.

    There is no need to make a complex metapackage system.

    I find Gentoo's python based system way overly complex and buggy. You need to emerge rsync quite a few times during a new install to ensure you are using the latest version of portage.

    The FreeBSD ports system on the other hand are just simple tcsh scripts. Under /etc/defaults/make.conf you can specify which mirrors to use for popular ports or you can type in the closest FreeBSD ftp site and over-ride it for the fastest download speed.

    If any of you reading this use FreeBSD 5.x go to /usr/local/examples/etc/defaults/make.conf and edit, cut and paste the data to /etc/defaults/make.conf. For some dumb reason the FreeBSD team moved all the import rc scripts there. The big commented scripts is one of the traditional strength's of FreeBSD. I hate it when they make it harder for newbies.Do a man make.conf for more info.

    WHen you do a "make install clean" the port scripts just use standard ftp and http sites in the makefile to download the apps. Nothing complex and its alot easier to use.

    I can not speak of fink because I have never used it.

    Simple shell scripting can get rid of alot of complexity.

    • > You need to emerge rsync quite a few times during a new install to ensure you are using the latest version of portage.

      This isn't true. You run it once and it actually runs rsync, giving you the latest version of portage.

      >The FreeBSD ports system on the other hand are just simple tcsh scripts.

      Gentoo's ebuilds are simple Bash scripts.

    • Ever heard of /etc/make.conf on gentoo?
    • >You need to emerge rsync quite a few times
      > during a new install to ensure you are using
      > the latest version of portage.
      I'd have to disagree here. Unless your 'emerge world' takes more than a week, it isn't likely that there will be new ebuilds out. And even in that case, it is probably a matter of a new revision of an ebuild, rather than a new version of the software.

      >Under /etc/defaults/make.conf you can specify
      > which mirrors to use for popular ports or you
      > can type in the closest Fr
    • You already can: Behold NetBSD [netbsd.org]'s Packages Collection [netbsd.org]. Use it on NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, Irix, Darwin, Mac OS X...

      More details here [netbsd.org].
    • Well, so far as I can tell, the complexity of the Gentoo system is well-bounded, with nice python scripts not all that much more complicated than your average shell script (Assuming you're able to program, of course.

      And I can't really imagine what you're talking about with "You need to emerge rsync quite a few times during a new install to ensure you are using the latest version of portage." Granted, installation has quite a few steps (For the most customized, only) but I don't remember ever having to 'eme
    • Jordan Hubbard wrote FreeBSD's port system (based mostly off bsd .mk files, not just tcsh scripts), which was then ported to NetBSD and OpenBSD. He's never been happy with it, so he wrote the OpenDarwin port system, based off tcl scripts.

      Just nitpicking. :-)

  • LotR Reference ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Amiasian ( 157604 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @09:22AM (#6261221)
    ... Three packages for the Mac users under the sun ...
    And one metapackage to find them, and in the darkness bind them. In the land of shell, where the shadows lie.

  • the benefits should be obvious (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zojas ( 530814 ) <kevin@astrophoenix.com> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:40AM (#6261600) Homepage
    The common problem they share is getting every piece of software to compile & run correctly on OS X. They can obviously pool their talents (and patches) to attack the porting of the software.

    each group simply provides their own set of software for installing and maintaining the ported software on your OS X system. They get to share & distribute the hard work of actually porting the packages. Then everyone benefits, regardless of which package manager you choose.

  • Hm. If only Linux groups could unite like this.
  • we Fink, Gentoo, & DarwinPorts

    I Fink Gentoo & Darwinports as well

    What do you Fink ?

  • The timing of this announcement [metapkg.org] is no accident. Think of WWDC starting on Monday. The eyes of the tech press will be firmly fixed on Moscone Center in San Francisco; at least on the first day.

    So what better time to put forth the story "we can offer Unix/Linux apps from different sources, and do it in a way where we aren't stepping on each others toes!"

    This is a really positive step.

  • What about Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by seanthenerd ( 678349 )
    What does Apple (the company) itself think of all this? I suppose it could see it as an advantage, more apps for it's OS, but they might also see it as more competition. Strange that nobody has said anything about Apple yet, considering that it's http://apple.slashdot.org/!
    • Apple's #1 priority is selling Apple hardware. While they make some $ through the sale of software, harware is far and away their major source of income. I would expect that Apple is delighted when someone else writes software that works well on the Mac platform; just another reason for people to buy a Mac. The difference between Apple and their carnivorous competitor is that Apple doesn't really care what you run on their computer, as long as you buy the computer.

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