Darwin Ports

[David J. Haines]

Scott,

MacPorts is DarwinPorts, just with a new name.  That happened some  
time ago, and I would assume that the port files are largely compatible.

Fink is a separate entity altogether; IIRC they do both source and  
binary distributions of software.  Some would say that consolidation  
would make sense, others would say that one does things better than  
the other and vice versa.  I personally don't like how Fink worked  
back in the day, so I've been on darwinports and then macports ever  
since.

The BSDs (and I wouldn't say "other BSDs") handle packages  
differently.  I'm mostly familiiar with FreeBSD, so that's what I'll  
discuss.  You can install via binary packages on it, but they're  
usually out of date and uncustomizable.  The only exception is  
commercial software, which is often binary package only.  Other than  
that, there's the ports collection, which is probably the single  
biggest reason people use FreeBSD.  Essentially, there's a huge  
directory tree of Makefiles and you just run "make install clean" for  
those you want to install and "make deinstall" for those you want to  
uninstall.  You update the directory tree to update the Makefiles and  
run the uninstall and reinstall for the ports you want to update.   
There are a couple of ports that provide port versioning management as  
well as binary packaging and other features lacking in the basic ports  
implementation.  FreeBSD has several times more software than does  
MacPorts available.

As for compatibility, they're surprisingly similar.  OS X uses, IIRC,  
FreeBSD's userland, so the user's command line experience is  
practically identical.  They say that launchd will work just fine on  
FreeBSD, but I've never tried and it's something you'd have to install  
via ports or otherwise.

Please feel free to correct me, everyone.  It's been some time since  
I've really used FreeBSD seriously.

David

On Jul 24, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Scott Haneda wrote:

> This may be a silly question, and my phone only access today is  
> preventing me from better research.
>
> Are MacPorts port files compatable with Darwin Ports? Is Darwin  
> Ports still even alive?
>
> Where does Fink fit into all this? If Fink is still active, would it  
> not make sense to team up and consolidate the two projects? Perhaps  
> there are fundamental differences in Fink and MacPorts.
>
> What are the package managers for the other BSD's? If I was to  
> desire to start using something like FreeBSD or openBSD, would I be  
> able to have easy access to all the great software MacPorts offers?
>
> Getting a little off topic, how parallel are the other BSD's to OS  
> X. For example, would I find launchd on free/open BSD?
>
> Thanks all.
> -- 
> Scott
> Iphone says hello.
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