snapd

[Takeshi Enomoto]

Dear Ryan, Alexey and all,

I enjoyed reading Ryan’s speech!

> Fink was written in 2000 shortly after the release of Mac OS X Public Beta. MacPorts was started in 2002. Why didn't its creators instead contribute to Fink? I don't know; I wasn't part of the project back then.

I used to contribute to Fink, but I liked the philosophy of MacPorts.
I am grateful to the support from the friendly MacPorts team
in maintaining the ports that I contribute to.

> We have a bit of a friendly rivalry, and we share solutions as the need arises.

I sometimes look for solution in Fink, Howebrew and
other package managers on different platforms.
I try to make MacPorts competitive in Science (Earth Science in particular) and
I do have a rivalry.
I do have an experience in cooperating with Homebrew.

A while ago I created a port call dotwrp to fix the bugs
in vecLib framework when used with Fortran.
mcg1969 who contributes to Homebrew greatly extended
dotwrp and created vecLibFort.
When I became aware of it, I decided to make dotwrp obsolete and
adopt vecLibFort into MacPorts.
Of course it requires manual interpretation from Ruby to Tcl.

> But the Tcl language was chosen for reasons which may still be valid, and we have a growing collection of currently over 10,000 Portfiles.

I believe that Tcl's unique syntax keeps Portfile concise.

The old languages like Fortran and Tcl survive
because they have their raison d’être!

Takeshi

-----
Takeshi Enomoto
takeshi at macports.org