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

[Anders F Björklund]

Titus von Boxberg wrote:

>> 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.

There is no real dualism here, though. It will use ./configure && make install to make the packages, and use the packages to install the launcher.

Even with FreeBSD, you can use PackageKit to provide the icons, portupgrade to handle the dependencies and make/tar to handle packages...

> 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.

Right, you can still provide both user interfaces (end user and developer)
And application bundles are easier to use than the .desktop files, IMHO.

> 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.

MacPorts _is_ a distro maker, however. Just allows a couple of variants.
But if you _do_ use those variants, you won't have prebuilt archives ?

> 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!

Feel free to use port -d, if you want to see the matrix unravel itself...

> 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.

Or maybe just be less "picky about who its friends are", perhaps. :-)

--anders

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