A Plea to Reduce Dependences

[Anders F Björklund]

Arno Hautala 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.

Fink only has one tree now (called "stable"), for lack of resources...
But how many trees are available isn't limited with either system ?

Both MacPorts and Fink do use _some_ system resources, and Homebrew
does allow _some_ dupes, so it's a rather fuzzy difference all around.

>> 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.

The main difference is that you can install the packages without
needing the rest of the build system and ports/formula sources,
there was some talk about such a feature for MacPorts as part of
the Google Summer of Code projects - but it didn't happen...

The archives lack enough dependency information to be installable
without the index, and doesn't contain enough version information.
(i.e. it will say which port it links to, but not which pkg version)
But you can (soon?) use it without Xcode, which is "good enough" ?

For fink, the packages are handled by dpkg (or apt) after building.

But at least MacPorts has more archives, than Homebrew has bottles.

--anders