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

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Aug 16, 2011, at 5:01 PM, Anders F Björklund wrote:
> 
> Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> 
>> Few people probably remember this, but back when I started using MacPorts, one of the selling points was that it used the built-in MacOS X software (as opposed to fink, which installed its own versions of everything).
> 
> As I remember it, it was quite the other way around ?
> (as DarwinPorts was building most things for PureDarwin)

When I first started using it (2003ish, IIRC), many ports used lib: or bin: style dependencies

(see http://web.archive.org/web/20030712080010/http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/darwinports/darwinports/dports/devel/twisted/Portfile for an example), so you used the system perl/python/openssl instead of having to build a new one.

It was something I was very happy for (at first).

> Fink *still* uses system versions, where available...
> (Using a /sw/bin/fink-virtual-pkgs script to determine)

... and in MacPorts land I think the plan was to not have to have virtual packages (like fink), but to have integration with the OS installer (and the almost mythical apkg format/registry that was going to make things work better).

Having said that, I haven't really used fink, so I don't know if virtual packages maps really well to what MacPorts was thinking of doing at that time...

> Both of them rebuild a lot of Mac OS X provided software.
> 
> Homebrew doesn't, but instead it has some "other issues".

I can imagine.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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