Building MacPorts on a Linux system

[Sumner Trammell]

Hi,

I have been extremely satisfied with MacPorts on my Mac. I love that
MacPorts is self-contained and the ports and their dependencies don't
touch the rest of the system. I compiled it with:

--prefix=~/macports --with-tclpackage=~/macports/Library/Tcl

and everything is happily isolated in my home directory.



MacPorts works so well that I would like to build it on a Linux system
and use it there. I'm (unfortunately) using SuSE (SLES) Linux. Running
configure without options died here:

checking objc/objc.h usability... no
checking objc/objc.h presence... no
checking for objc/objc.h... no
configure: error: Can't locate Objective C runtime headers


I don't know a lot about Linux, but I expected this.  Can you
recommend some configure options that might allow MacPorts to build on
a vanilla SuSE/SLES Linux system? (Is it possible for me to turn off
the Mac-specific things?)

If there is no way to build MacPorts on a Linux system, is there a
next-best package management system that:

1. Works on the command-line.

2. Seamlessly builds packages and their dependencies from source.

3. Lets me locate my packages and dependencies in an entirely
self-contained way, not touching the rest of the system.

4. Works as well as MacPorts.



Thanks.
-JS