BSD ports system

Jeremy Huddleston jeremyhu at macports.org
Fri Apr 30 10:51:35 PDT 2010


Most of MacPorts should be able to work on the *BSDs ... and ports that don't could be fixed if you report bugs.

If you want GUI, you're best off using *BSD rather than GNU-Darwin.  The IOKit based X11 server is long dead, but you can certainly try to get it up and running.  I think it was still around in xorg-server-1.3 (not the -apple releases).

As far as launchd goes, you should be able to get it running on the *BSDs.  I don't believe any of them use it natively, but that doesn't mean you can't do it yourself.  Check out http://launchd.macosforge.org/trac



On Apr 30, 2010, at 09:38, Scott Haneda wrote:

> I am thinking of working on a project where cost may not allow the end product to remain on Mac OS X hardware.  This means I would like to chose a package management system that most closely mimics what I am familiar with, in an OS I am familiar with.
> 
> After a bit of looking around, I think that any of the BSD's will suit me well, with a lean on FreeBSD or OpenBSD.  I like OpenBSD for it's bare bones locked down methodology, but worry that I will be hardware bound in many of my decisions as it simply may not support the hardware I may need to throw at it.  
> 
> Any suggestions, in that if I must move away from Mac OS X on this project, and want to be as similar to Mac OS X as possible, which is my best BSD to use.  For example, I would like to use an OS that uses launchd over cron, like Mac OS X, or any of those other types of features that I already understand on OS X.
> 
> Or, can I literally just use Gnu-Darwin OS and be in perfect parity with Mac OS X aside from the Finder and other GUI based things.  Does this mean I could even use MacPorts on a Darwin based BSD OS?
> 
> This all leads me to my final thought, which is, has any effort ever been made to make a BSD ports to MacPorts type of converter?  Either as a standalone converter to get the ball rolling, or something that works in real time, and would always be able to use any BSD port as it stands.
> 
> Looking over their ports repository, it looks to me like things are done significantly different than MacPorts.  However, when all is said and done, both are instructions that tell software how to build, so in that sense, this seems highly possible.  There are 20K of them, not sure of that is good or bad, it may be too many for the MP project at it's current capacity.
> 
> Any thoughts or ramblings on this would be appreciated.
> -- 
> Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ * 
> 
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