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DarwinPorts is Hot
It seems like every semester something happens that causes me to do a systems scramble right before things get going. This year, we decided to move all our Web offerings in the ECLab onto our new XServe over Christmas break. It had to happen sometime and now’s as good a time as any.
One of the things I needed to get on to the XServe (running OS X) was netpbm. I’ve never used DarwinPorts before, but a google of netpbm and OS led me to it. I have to say that it totally rocks. Usually installing netpbm on a new machine is a pain in the neck because of all the dependencies. The DarwinPorts executable just grabbed them all and made them before grabbing and making netpbm. Worked like a charm.
Posted by windley on January 6, 2006 11:45 AM
Comment from Nathan at January 6, 2006 4:42 PM
DarwinPorts is currently on the forefront for managing OSS installations on OS X.
Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) is a competing OSS package manager. A couple of years ago, DP and Fink seemed to be neck and neck. Now, Fink seems to have fallen very far behind, not supporting any of the newer versions of any of the software I use.
Gentoo for OS X is one to watch (#gentoo-osx on freenode, or http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos/targets.xml). It's not usable yet, but the project has been working on leveraging Gentoo Linux's package manager, "portage." Once a few more major hurdles are passed (see the Milestones section on the link above), I expect this will become a major player in OSS management on OS X, as they will be able to leverage the huge tree of ebuilds for existing software on Linux. I use Gentoo Linux on my x86 servers, and would love to use it on my PowerBook as well.
Comment from Gary at January 7, 2006 10:36 PM
I've been using DarwinPorts since the week after I got my Mac (last May). I was happy to find it, since the package management system I'm most familiar with is the FreeBSD ports system, and DarwinPorts is fairly similar. It's also the easiest method I've found yet to get gvim working on OS X ("port install vim+huge+aqua+perl").