port (pkg|dmg)

[Anders F Björklund]

Marko Käning wrote:

> Speechless I am. I am new to Apple and grew to like it, but I am  
> surprised to hear that one needs a third party tool for this task. :(
> MacPorts' infrastructure seems to be better than Apple's software  
> management, if I see that right… ;)

The missing uninstall was one of the reasons to use RPM...
The legacy compression (gzip, instead of lzma) was another.
And of course the /etc packages that made system unbootable.
(should be /private/etc, due to bugs with symlinks in "pax")

That was before Leopard, with MacPorts 1.6 three years ago...
When making .pkg, one is supposed to make an uninstaller too.
This is not too different from Windows, where the "setup.exe"
usually creates a "uninst.exe". MacPorts _could_ do this too.


But uninstall isn't the biggest problem, deleting /opt/local is easy:
http://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.macports.uninstalling.html
The biggest problem are dependencies, forcing you to update the mpkg.
Even though only _one_ of the included pkg actually changed, inside it.

The main issue here is "how do I create packages with MacPorts, that
can be used without installing MacPorts". Support for that *is* poor.
The easiest way to solve it, is to install MacPorts and just use it ?
Missing graphic interface and missing binary packages are different...

--anders