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

[Titus von Boxberg]

Am 27.08.2011 um 11:55 schrieb Anders F Björklund:

>> 
>> I guess, then, that this is really an appeal to hide the details since you can only get away with doing things "the Apple way" if you also hide the majority of the working parts from the end-user.  In MacPorts' case, this would essentially mean having a GUI tool which allowed one to click away on various packages to one's hearts content and then click "Go!" and have all the right deps installed transparently and with a minimum of download and CPU resources consumed.
> 
> Unless somebody completes Pallet, the only working GUI would be Port Authority. And that is still too technical for most users, since they don't want to hear about ports/packages but about apps/software. With icons. Big icons. <sigh> So it would need something more "App Store", first. Like what happened in Ubuntu, when the Synaptic tool changed into the Software Centre.
I strongly disagree with this "either a BIG icon from app store lookalike or configure; make; make install" dualism.
As a long time BSD user (and Linux disliker) I'm very fond of OSX providing a friendly UNIX implementation where I do not have to take care of all the boring stuff myself, e.g. always having a partly broken openoffice.
And I find that MacPorts fits in very well for developers, maybe "experts" in apple slang, who "simply" want to use stuff they depend upon but do not really care on how it actually gets installed, and also for those who do care, and find MP providing a well understandable, configurable and extensible recipe.

Whether MacPorts should actually be developed into something app store like, I think, has nothing to do with the original question.
I have the impression that most software that gets built by MP does not fit into the big icon scenario. The Big Icon software I'm using is normally already available without using MP. I think that MP will always be for the 10-20% of users  that Apple does not (directly) care about and for the share of OSS projects that do not really care about OSX, and I really like this concept:
It makes OSX fit better for developers: With BSD+ports you have the problem that software that usually is regarded "just as tools", like for me openoffice, have to be installed manually, which is boring and error prone. With Linux you have the problem that most of the distro makers feel it's en vogue to provide a windows/macos style of sw installation, and there is not really another infrastructure like ports or MP available that comes in handy when you want to have variants or slight deviations of the stuff that get's installed, or if you want to use this infrastructure for own software parts not yet covered by the package makers.

So I'm not so sure if there really is a market for MP being the main producer of Big icon software.
Instead, I do think that MP can "wrap itself in the clothing of ease of use" already. It's just a matter of point of view. The first time I saw the output of `port install +variant` compared to the scroll-back-buffer-crashing stuff that gets output by make install from BSD ports, man, that was ease of use!
Of course, MP might provide  even more ease-of-use and get a larger user base share if binary packages, maybe even with a nice GUI frontend, eventually get implemented.

Regards
Titus

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