A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Anders F Björklund]

M.E. O'Neill wrote:

>>>> Because what the Mac really needed was yet another packaging solution.  How many is that now?
>>> 
>>> I'm counting 4 or so. Most of which doesn't have any packages available!
>>> That would be MacPorts (port), Fink (fink), Homebrew (brew) and my RPMS.
>> 
>> Almost forgot GTK-OSX (jhbuild) and my new build scripts, so more like 6+.
> 
> Don't forget i-Installer (now largely defunct), and TexLive (which packages software and includes an updater).  Then there's Apple's .pkg files, as made by PackageMaker and similar tools.  And then we have CPAN, gems, and eggs, and all that stuff.

Already forgotten...

I didn't count .pkg since it's mostly an end format (even MacPorts
can do them!) and didn't count the language-specific tools - since
most of those are available as packages rather than using them...

There's some more "one-off" variants too, like Rudix or Gentoo/Alt
or even the FreeBSD Ports or NetBSD Ports that some have attempted -
most of them not working very well on Mac OS X or not many packages.


The package that I had in mind was "zeroinstall-injector", which has
two major dependencies: GnuPG and PyGTK. You'd think that be simple ?
On Linux they are, but on Mac OS X it's only "easy" until you actually
try to install it and it needs Developer Tools and heaps of time/space.

That's why I made my own packages: http://0install.net/install-mac.html
Either of the installation methods "work", with different drawbacks...
The brew Formula was removed/rejected, so there you have to build from
source (including PyGTK, since they don't allow any Python modules).


But yeah, it's ironic that there are "57 channels but nothing on". :-P

Hopefully binary packages for MacPorts (and bindist for Fink) improves.

--anders


PS.
Actually there's even two Fink since it doesn't do multiarch but that's
a different story. Rumors has it that dpkg will fix it for Debian 7.0 ?
Fortunately Mac OS X has universal binaries, so it has it easier and
of course there's only x86_64 in Lion anyway so that's also "easy". :-)