no, it won't give you binaries without compilation. it is a ports system, like freebsd's ports or pkgsrc, specifically built for darwin. it is compilation only and last i recall there is no fancy gui for it.

the main reason people get so vehement about fink-alternatives is that the fink developers have a nasty habit of releasing horribly broken builds that fuck everyone's boxes up for weeks. they also can take weeks to fix massive brokenness. in that light, stabbing oneself in the eye can be a better alternative to fink.

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Time for the unix guru type at the desk across from me to get ethereal running on his ibook: two days (first he tried compiling it, then darwinports, then source fink). Time for stupid old me with binary fink: 2 minutes.

I think adminny types like dports because it lets them believe that they're running something called Darwin/BSD, not something called Apple Mac OS X.

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I wonder if it would help to set up a little compile farm that just fed off DarwinPorts and made packages. Is that feasible ?

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I second this. I hate DarwinPorts a little less than I hate Fink. Fink looks better on paper but the quality of packaging is uneven. Ages ago when I used Fink's xemacs it was configured with the packager's favorite color scheme - something like black on yellow. Awesome. The whole fink source / binary double layer system seems very strange to me and often the GUI seemed, um, less than useful. But that was a year ago, maybe it's unbroken now.

The main plus to DarwinPorts is that it delivers what it promises. The main minus is it basically promises ./configure; make && make install

Maybe I'm just mad at Fink because when I installed Fink I expected Debian, and i got, well, Fink.

Use Fink until it pisses you off, then switch to DarwinPorts. That's what everyone else seems to do.

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There are binary packages to be had for Tiger. FYI: there are binary packages to be had for all of the BSD variants too. They're spiffy that way. It's only the total retards like me that have bunches of knobs that they don't really need in their configs that ever build anything from source.

As for the horribly broken build thing: I'm with you on the stabbing of eyes. I just think that using something else is easier.

Look for my post below for pointers.

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Not to mention that people get things working with Fink, then never bother doing updated releases for Fink when new versions come out.

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I've ran both Fink and DP, and DP tends to have more ports that aren't broken compared to Fink. Annoyingly, yes, there are no binaries available, which makes installing larger packages take a longer time.

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Rather off topic, but have you noticed that the 'THE' in your icon also looks like:
W
T
F

Took several parses to figure out what "WTF Mac Store" meant...

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I think people like DarwinPorts because Jordan Hubbard is involved and because of its MetaPkg format. Fink is certainly more mature.

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Both systems have plenty of problems, but the issues with DarwinPorts at least involve *current* software. Even the Fink unstable branch is generally horribly out of date. Example: they still ship GTK+ 2.4 in unstable, six months after the release of the binary-compatible 2.6. The Gimp is still at version 2.0, and even that must be a recent addition because the last time I was playing with Fink (a few months ago), they only had version 1.2.

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Indeed, Fink has horribly outdated packages, possibly because they don't have enough maintainers.
As for DarwinPort's GUI, there was an internal Apple project developed, and the first idea was to put it on OSX 10.3 (in fact, the first betas shipped with it in it). But then Apple decided to not go the hard-core unix route, they removed it from the final product, and we never heard again about this GUI app ever again, while Darwin Ports feels to be a bit in limbo atm.

In other words: don't bother too much with either Fink or DarwinPorts. They both sport half-maintaned solutions. I am sure there is an equivelant native Mac app anyway for everything.

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I use Fink, personally. I've thought about switching to DP but have the same reservations you do.

I've actually been running unstable Fink (and thus using the compile-from-source method of installing) since until this week the stable branch didn't support 10.4. It was a pretty rough transition but it looks like they finally got glib working well enough to run non-trivial GNOME apps.

I have noticed a lot of regressions in 10.4 either in the X11 server or ssh forwarding — running X apps on my linux box often now die with "Bad Atom" errors and such.

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That may just mean that you need to put "ForwardX11Trusted yes" in ~/.ssh/config now. It's a "feature".

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Damn you to hell. You know I don't use those guis. Frivolity, I say. But, to answer your question: there is and there isn't.

First off, you don't have to compile. The binary package base is at http://packages.opendarwin.org/. That's one step. You can see the announcement mesage here. Basically you'll wind up clicking on a file in your web browser and letting the mystical network gnomes deal with the rest. That should handle the immediate problem of getting the crap on to your machine.

As for the gui... Have I mentioned "damn you to hell" yet? Because I meant to. The thing you're looking for is called DPGUI. I hear it works, but it's new, so I fear and mistrust it. You'll be happy to know that it's another thing keeping tcl alive.

I do think that a pretty GUI to a broken package system might not be a thousand times better than no gui to a solid package system, but that's just me. Fortunately, this isn't a call that anyone has to make. If you look at the documentation again, you'll see that the parts that concern you as a user are very, very small. You've been in linux-land too long. Those sections aren't small because they're undocumented; they're small because that's all there is to it. It really is that simple.

Do you want the bad news about this now or later? I'll warn you, there's a little bad news. It's nowhere near the debian inspired insanity of Fink-bad-news, but it's bad news.

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Jeeze. I was wrong. The documentation has not been updated to reflect the new level of easy.

The section of the manual about installing darwinports is no longer correct. Forget the cvs stuff. Just make sure that xcode is on you box and get this.

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yee, it involves compiling, no, it's not that hard.

actually, it's gentoo! so things will be compiled for your hardware quite well, and it's a metadistribution, so you automatically gain the benefit of the gentoo package library maintainers work. just install, emerge, and bob's your uncle.

TigerCow? - Gentoo for Mac OS X

there are rumblings about people providing precompiled binaries too, but that's sort of heretical to the gentoo worldview, imho.

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Oh man... That makes three immature package systems, two that are source centric, two that have incomplete tcl guis, two that are takeoffs from the worst of linux zealotry, and one that is known to be for ricers.

This needs a Venn Diagram!

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In the end, you can only trust binaries you build yourself, from source. Yes, it's a pain. Yes, it would be preferable to just be able to download binaries, have them installed, and have them work. However, open software just doesn't WORK that way. Whenever you install binaries, you are implicitly held hostage by the skill and care of the person who compiled and built the package.

I've been screwed over way to many times by installing binaries that were built and packaged by a moron.

The only way you can be ever be sure that's it's going to be done properly is to compile it yourself. Believe me, the absolute last thing I want to do when I get home is configure and compile yet more software. But yet, when I do it, shit works.

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Yeah, see, my experience is the exact opposite. I have encountered a broken binary far, far less often than I have encountered "you are lost in a twisty maze of undocumented dependencies, all alike".

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can someone send me a link with a tutorial/info on how to install the binary packages for darwin? http://packages.opendarwin.org/Tiger-Packages/ the documentation of opendarwin only talks about ports that nneed compiling, while I need the info on how to install the binaries...

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Mileage, etc, etc...

1. Make sure that you have Xcode installed.


2. Get the DarwinPorts base installed following the instructions.


3. Then it's basically lots of clicking in the package repository.

Letting Dports compile tends to be easier. The binary package repo is pretty new and a little incomplete, but what's there does work. Your other option is to use DPGUI, but I think that will insist on compiling. It's definitely a point-and-drool operation, though. The instructions are in a very short pdf in the DPGUI zip file.

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I just got a mac and so far I'm disappointed with Fink. The ethereal build doesn't work on Tiger. Asking fink commander to retrieve binaries for it shows a bunch of cryptic errors saying certain packages (which don't exist) have illegal dependencies. However, I tried installing some stuff with darwinports from the command line a few weeks ago and it went pretty badly. I ended up having to compile some packages by visiting the website, downloading the latest targz, and compiling myself.

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... but you should just use Linux. ;)

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Don't both Fink and Darwinports represent everything you went to the Mac to get away from?

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Yes, they totally, totally do. I had a moment of weakness. I'm not made of stone.

The things that drove me to that dark side were:

• An irresistable desire to see if xscreensaver still works on 10.4;
• Wanting to use wget, since I know it better than curl
• Wanting to keep using Privoxy, since I'm used to it. (But that's ok, I found a .pkg of Privoxy.)

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despite my previous comment, i love you because your unwillingness to tinker with your computers is not only completely understood, but also the mark of someone who has been an engineer ;]

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You're being slashdotted.

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Those bastards. He specifically asked them not to post it. This calls for some kind of retaliation. What is it about UNIX fan boys that they feel the need to share their opinions when asked not to?
http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/1999-06ReaderMail.html#Linux

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i can't explain that one either, darwin ports seems to have more stuff, but a lot of stuff isn't well-maintained-
fink has worked great for me-
after you've got the usual libs in place, a lot of other weird/obscure stuff that isn't in fink (like fluxbox and rox) will usually compile direct from source without issue-
the worst i've had to do is munge a "configure" script here and there, because a lot of shit isn't looking for "Darwin"...
welcome to the dark side, rms be damned! :P

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You are an alien life form. You are some kind of alien creature that has eaten and replaced some poor human. That's the only reason I can think of why you'd even be thinking about installing something like fluxbox or rox on OS X.

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fink appears to want to turn your machine into a badly administered debian box, which may feel comforting during the transition period. I still have it installed, for latex, but try to ignore it as much as possible.

I haven't used DarwinPorts.

There's much less need for either compared to a few years ago (or maybe I've just got better at finding packages of software I care about).

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For latex, I highly recommend TexShop, which comes with a separate tetex installer.

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Don't actually know if this works well: http://www.wordtech-software.com/dpgui.html

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$20 shareware called port authority
http://www.codebykevin.com/portauthority.html

this entry came up while goggling for a gui... so I figured I'd update the comments here in case anyone looks here over 2 years after it was created

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