A Plea to Reduce Dependences

[Arno Hautala]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 03:29, Anders F Björklund <afb at macports.org> wrote:
>
> Pity, though. There's nothing *that* special between
> all the various package managers and their file formats
> and their dependencies, except that they're "different" ?

It's not so much that they're different, but that they track and
manage what has been installed and can break if a resource is used
that shouldn't be available (from the perspective of the package
manager). There's also the philosophical differences: MacPorts and
Fink install packages that are already available from the OS because
the resource is then not subject to breakage when the OS changes; Fink
uses stable and unstable trees; Homebrew uses system resources,
installs to an "overloaded" prefix, and suggests that this location be
made writeable by unauthenticated users.

> Not that Macports or Homebrew manage packages, but anyway.

How so? Aside from compiling the software on the client machine, they
do everything else that comes to mind for the definition of a package
manager. Many *nix package managers also allow compiling from source
when a binary isn't available. And, MacPorts does offer some
precompiled binary packages.

-- 
arno  s  hautala    /-|   arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448