Re: [SLUG] Defining "Mainsteam"

[Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+slug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morgan Storey wrote:

> Uhh Darwin ports... it basically gives you apt-get for mac.

Thats rather a stretch.

> I am not a fan
> of macs but I am pretty sure it has been around for a while:
> http://darwinports.com/

I'd had a Mac for many years. I used to run Debian on it, but when I
replaced it I re-installed OSX. Its an old G3 PowerPC model.

I have tried Darwin ports and I was not impressed. Darwin ports compared
very poorly with Debian or Ubuntu.

The problems I faced:

 - Compiling everything from source on an old slow machine like mine
   is just horribly painful.

 - Compiling large/complex packages with lots of obscure depenadances
   (eg GNU Octave) was hellish because more than half the dependancies
   were broken.

 - Depending on upstream source tarballs to be available on hundreds or
   thousands different web servers all over the planet is plain and
   simply not reliable.

 - Darwin ports default versions of autoconf/automake/libtool were not
   compatible with each other the 2 or 3 times I tried this (all attempts
   separated by at least a couple of months). This is not an isolated
   incident, just the only one of many that I can remember now.

I'm sure Darwinports works fine for a small number of core packages (ie
git, ruby, mysql and a maybe dozen others), but anything not being used
by a large numebr of people is likely to be broken.

If you want to know what makes the Debian packages so good, look no
futher than Debian's build bot (http://buildd.debian.org/). Each and
every source package is placed in a minimal chroot environment, the
build dependancies listed in the package are installed and then the
package is built. Only packages that build successfully are uploaded
to the repository.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/