Darwin Ports

[Rainer Müller]

On 2009-07-24 19:13 , Scott Haneda wrote:
> Are MacPorts port files compatable with Darwin Ports? Is Darwin Ports  
> still even alive?

DarwinPorts is the old name of MacPorts. It is the same project. What
you see at that website is a scam which only wants to make money.

See <http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPorts> for details.

> 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.

Fink uses Debian-based tools like dpkg and apt-get. The project is alive
to my knowledge.

It is a different approach, so consolidating would rather be an
either/or decision. Multiple options are good as people can decide what
they want to use.

> 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?

NetBSD uses pkgsrc,
FreeBSD/OpenBSD use a port system based on Makefiles.

In general their collections are bigger and better maintained than the
MacPorts ports tree.

> 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?

launchd was invented by Apple and is currently only used there (except
Darwin derivates). The Apache License 2.0 does not qualify for base
systems on *BSD, so I don't think it will ever be used as init there.

Rainer