macports on linux

Ian Wadham iandw.au at gmail.com
Tue Apr 2 22:05:42 PDT 2013


On 03/04/2013, at 10:35 AM, James Linder wrote:
> On 03/04/2013, at 3:00 AM, macports-users-request at lists.macosforge.org wrote:
> 
>>> If not, the old fashioned way of installing via a tarball is pretty much
>>> the way to go. Linux is pretty much set up out the box to do this (after
>>> installing 'Development Tools' or build-essential & so on) so it's
>>> usually no sweat.
>> 
>> This is what pkgsrc uses as a interoperable solution (afaik there are some 
>> pkgsrc peoples here within macports) BUT including a clean software management 
>> allowing clean installs, deinstall, rolling updates, feature management etc. 
>> (as macport does on Mac only).
> 
> My $0.02
> 
> The (original) comment is off-the-cuff and not well considered:
> 
> Both rpm and deb build systems are as easy (or IMHO easier) than macports.
> If (and there are many ways, gentoo and archlinux are already mentioned) you use SuSE's build service you can get already created pretty much the latest of anything you choose (I admit being wrong a few times).
> 
> So I think saying 'lets doit with macports' is a silly idea that glosses over the already working systems because (say) apt-get on ubuntu gets old packages (which it is supposed to do !! I want a working well debuged stable whatever, not the latest greatest attempt)

Exactly.  That is my understanding.  Ubuntu is meant to be stable stuff.  If you want
to go "bleeding edge" in Linux, there are several ways to do that, including cloning
and building from developers' repositories or (a few hours older) using developers'
snapshots, as well as using more current distros than Ubuntu, as you have
suggested, James.

Speaking personally, one reason I am here on Apple Mac developing KDE games
(direct from the repository) is because MacPorts is so much quieter and less prone to
upheavals than the Linux environment I used to use --- so I can be more productive here.

And MacPorts regularly gives me very recent kdelibs4 and qt4-mac libraries, which
are fine for my development purposes, with a minimum of fuss.  I love it.

Cheers, Ian W.



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