BSD ports system

[Anders F Björklund]

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.

I found that FreeBSD was a good replacement for "Pure" Darwin. The  
portupgrade set of tools (aka pkgtools) make it rather nice and  
friendly to use, even...

> 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.

It is however a different operating system, and requires different  
tools. And you would of course have to use something based on X11 for  
any graphic interface...

> 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?

You can, in theory, use MacPorts on Darwin OS. You can even use it on  
FreeBSD, at least MacPorts 1.8.0. In practice, a lot of the ports  
would fail to build.

--anders