Porting... the ports

[Anders F Björklund]

Daniel Heberl:

> I noticed that Rocco Lucia updated in December the tar balls of
> "Darwin Ports" for Snow Leopard
> (<http://alice.iscanet.com/~rlucia/devel/darwin_ports/files/darwin_ports-0.5.1.tar.gz>).
> 
> I see that, besides recompiling libfetch and libmd, only a few patches
> are applied to the original FreeBSD makefiles in order to compile the
> pkgtools back on Mac OS X.

Interesting project, unfortunate name.

Darwin OS is now dead, and DarwinPorts squatted...
I see the project is old, so it's understandable.
But it should *really* change the name it is using.
The guide link is broken too, but that's more minor.

I like FreeBSD Ports, and also the (ruby) "pkgtools":
http://wiki.freebsd.org/portupgrade
On a related note, you can also run MacPorts on BSD.
Not many of the ports of course, but at least "base".

> Now that PC-BSD has expanded its PBI binary format and pkgsrc
> also is providing new tools for installing binary packages from remote
> repositories, I think that MacPorts should start leveraging the massive
> resources the BSD community has developed already.

The PBI format is horrible*, but that's another story.

* Like anything else requiring running unsigned binaries
from strangers, whether it's autopackage or setup.exe.
To make matters worse, I think it also requires root...

--anders