A Plea to Reduce Dependences

[Arno Hautala]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 08:24, Anders F Björklund <afb at macports.org> wrote:
>
> Fink only has one tree now (called "stable"), for lack of resources...

Really? That's interesting. Without dragging this thread too far off
track, did they just merge the trees? Or, just drop support for
unstable?

> But how many trees are available isn't limited with either system ?

My understanding is that MacPorts doesn't have the concept of trees as
much as it supports an arbitrary number and location of trees that are
merged together. I think that Fink required switching between stable
and unstable, I don't remember if or how one could include an
arbitrary tree with the current selection. Meh, details.

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

True, I was going more for the philisophical goals rather than the
gritty details.

> 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...

Ah, true. That's still a good goal.

> But you can (soon?) use it without Xcode, which is "good enough" ?

Another (upcoming?) feature I didn't know about. I need to subscribe
to the VCS feed or idle on IRC more.


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

pgp b2c9d448