Why doesn't macports install prebuild packages? / give Linux another try

[Vlado Plaga]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:54:55 -0800
"Frank J. R. Hanstick" <trog24 at comcast.net> wrote:
>  My current platform is a dualMPC-7448 (G4 model) which is still not a well  supported cpu under Linux. 

Are you sure your system is still not well supported under Linux?

I have been using Linux before I got my first (and current) iMac in
2004, and I almost exclusively used Linux on this system (Debian and
Ubuntu) up until 2007. Then I bought Mac OS 10.5 for it. Mac OS 10.2,
the system my iMac came with, had been inferior to Linux in many ways
right from the start. But with Compiz (a compositing window manager)
becoming part of every standard Linux setup I started to miss one more
function in my system (apart from Adobe Flash and the "sleep mode"), so
I thought Mac OS and MacPorts (or Fink) would do a better job than
Linux with the basic "nv" display driver... which is not exactly true,
unfortunately.

Now for me Ubuntu has more up-to-date binary packages that just work,
yet under Mac OS I have more display blink. So I'm trying to work with
Mac OS, and cope with having to compile almost everything. But if you
don't have an Nvidia graphics card (but ATI) the equation would solve
differently. Anyway identical applications (VLC, claws-mail with many
files in one directory, or digiKam) perform significantly better on
Linux, on my iMac.

As today's mail from Joshua shows, there are just not enough
contributions to MacPorts to even think of regular binary releases -
especially if we'd like to have them for two or three versions of MacOS
(10.4 to 10.6), with all their different architectures (PPC, i386,
AMD64...). If I'm not mistaken binaries need "releases" (like Ubuntu
offers them twice a year), or at least the basic libraries must not
change versions for a considerable time, so that installed programs
depending on them don't break.

Regards,
Vlado