Fink vs. MacPorts

latest Fink is 0.8.x, released 9 months ago
latest darwinports is 1.4.0, released last month.

I found it difficult to install quality linux apps through fink and darwinports
fink's packages are ancient, installation from source is beyond my capability. and only one I successfully installed and ran is midnight commander.

darwinports/macports, I have yet to find out how to use it.

availability of quality linux app is bad, I searched all day, and couldn't find any way to get amarok running correctly.

fink is dead, long live macports

I am using macports on a MacBook Pro... I am not having any issues so far.

sudo port install <packagename>
sudo port upgrade all

If you are not in your sudoers file, you will get a warning message about not being in the sudoers file.. you need to add yourself to /etc/sudoers using the visudo command.. google it if you do not understand.

I must have missed the memo about fink being dead. They are doing regular news updates on their website.

Also, frequent releases != good product. It's not that simple.

SC68Cal said:

Also, frequent releases != good product. It's not that simple.

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Fink's packages are extremely old, for the pace of linux, you will miss a lot of exciting things with those old binary packages.

PetejHill, did u know a way to get amarok to work through macports?

clevin said:

PetejHill, did u know a way to get amarok to work through macports?

Click to expand...

PS, this is a screenshot of amarok, like it a lot, pity i couldn't find a way to get it work on my MB....

SC68Cal said:

Also, frequent releases != good product. It's not that simple.

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When you pick a package system like fink or darwinports, I mean, macports, most people, myself included, rely on maintainers to keep up to date on security patches. I am not sure how good either fink or macports are at keeping up to date with patches.

From what I have seen, the macports community seems much more active than the fink community. I used fink for a long time, but there came a point where I was having issues installing packages with fink and then switched.

panurge said:

So if I want something decently new, I should compile my own programs? How hard is that on Mac OS X? I'd guess that without any package managment taking care of te dependencies it's a real pain in the ass, especially if you have to install and compile all libraries too.

Hmm.. I should probably install Ubuntu along with OS X. Or run it with Parallels. Can I use low level programs like tcpdump through Parallels?

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my impression is compilation takes days for a app. can't do that..

clevin said:

my impression is compilation takes days for a app. can't do that..

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oh *&#$ no. maybe if you were building gnome, but not for most apps in macports. and i've done that before, namely with gnome in gentoo. it mostly took a long time because things failed to build...if you counted all the time without the gaps inbetween it would be vastly shorter than a couple of days.

fwiw i vastly prefer macports to fink. (then again i also use gentoo..)

janey said:

oh *&#$ no. maybe if you were building gnome, but not for most apps in macports. and i've done that before, namely with gnome in gentoo. it mostly took a long time because things failed to build...if you counted all the time without the gaps inbetween it would be vastly shorter than a couple of days.

fwiw i vastly prefer macports to fink. (then again i also use gentoo..)

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huh, that feel much better, maybe i should get xtools installed and try to compile amarok..

clevin said:

huh, that feel much better, maybe i should get xtools installed and try to compile amarok..

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Try http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/On_OS_X yet?

http://www.openlina.com/ just wait. this month this program is coming out. should make for a very interesting month!

[watch the videos]

I compile things all the time... It is not impossible, and it does not take forever. If something does not install, it will usually say why. If you read the INSTALL or README files, they will usually list dependancies. It can be very recursive if you are trying to install something complex. I was installing ethereal, I mean wireshark, with all the bells and whistles (full gdk) and that was, fun. It took about threee hours to track down everything before it would install.

With macports, it would be "sudo port install ethereal"

I use /usr/local/ for my PREFIX for things I install, unless I want to put them in ~/bin
I usually use ~/bin for things that I script

God luck

janey said:

Try http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/On_OS_X yet?

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u bet i tried the top5 results of google search of "amarok osx"

http://www.openlina.com/ just wait. this month this program is coming out. should make for a very interesting month!

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looks very interesting!, kinda like wine?
we will see.

To give this a whim of on-topic-icity: I prefer MacPorts.

wyatt23 said:

http://www.openlina.com/ just wait. this month this program is coming out. should make for a very interesting month!

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Yeah, it will indeed be interesting, but the contents of the FAQ must be taken into consideration. Main concerns include:

Q: Can existing Linux code run on LINA?
A: Linux command line programs and web applications can currently run on LINA, as can GUI applications that use the LINA library. We plan to support Qt in the near future as well as development using the GTK+ libraries.

Click to expand...

and

Q: How well do applications running on LINA perform, as compared to running on their native platforms?
A: There is a 2X performance hit for running applications in LINA. In the short-term, GUI applications take an additional performance hit. We will eliminate the additional hit when we optimize the mechanism by which we make operating system calls.

Click to expand...

So out of the gate it is doubtful that it will produce anything extremely interesting for pre-existing GUI apps. When they get Qt and GTK+ support and "optimize their mechanism," it could be rather neat. The other technologies they're employing -- mainly the security features -- seem somewhat interesting, too.

I do find their example command-line app running on both machines to be somewhat interesting. nano, or its root inspiration pico, is built into Mac OS X and many Linux flavors. The team sounds like a very committed, if not confident, and genuinely friendly bunch of folks though, so I'm hoping for its success.

its very serious that LINA's performance is so bad. >2x hit? practically ..... then.

Macports A+

Macports is the best package manager for OS X. 1.40 runs so well... It is faster and easier than FINK.

I'm a system administrator and I need certain linux utilities in my OS X env... Found that Fink required source/CVS builds for most packages AND good luck getting it from the preferred fink servers.

Macports is, as I've said before, built by Mac employees. They have a ticket system if you have any errors/problems. Just go to their web site and report a ticket and they will get back to you.

clevin said:

u bet i tried the top5 results of google search of "amarok osx"

looks very interesting!, kinda like wine?
we will see.

Click to expand...

I don't think amarok is supported by MacPorts, here is the port depository where I did a search and nothing came up.

And I use MacPorts. Never tried Fink. Though if you don't have a web connection MacPorts isn't all that useful.

gave up on MacPorts

Hi,

I thought I'd add my personal experience to this thread. I was using fink for the first 3.5 years that I'd had my first Mac, but got frustrated with the slow pace of updating many of the packages in the distribution. About 4 months ago, I switched to MacPorts to get more current applications. I really liked the update rates, but 1 update in 3 would crash and require some kind of manual intervention by me to re-stabilize my installation. I finally gave up on MacPorts and went back to fink ... and am happier for it.

attn thread poster: I am also a long time linux user who converted to OS X with a MBP.

I use fink. it works great, and has more packages than macports. half of macports' packages are unmaintained, and the popular fink packages have up to date versions. it's good stuff and its commands are debian apt-get style. I do development and all the good stuff in linux (compilers, tex, grace) are all there. they support leopard now too.

clevin said:

latest Fink is 0.8.x, released 9 months ago
latest darwinports is 1.4.0, released last month.

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Fink is getting regular updates, they recently released a version with works with Leopard. The "bundle" doesn't get updated maybe, but the online updated version through rsync ("fink selfupdate") gets regular changes.

Fink is not a dead project at all, despite what you might think from its website. Differences between Fink and Macports are largely religious ones, I personally have been using Fink for years and am still happy with it as I find it easier to use than Macports.

PS: Amarok is supported by fink, but you might need to go to the "unstable" tree, which is the best thing to do if you want the most up to date packages (its not really "unstable").

I've been using Macports for a while and it was decent, but then at school we have been creating a video game with Pygame and I have had to keep adding new libraries for it and Macports has been awful. It doesn't seem to download the dependencies it needs so then it yells that such and such is missing. I install that and it doesn't work, so I'm stuck. I just downloaded Fink a few minutes ago and so far it is going better for me and I really appreciate how it shows me more info (such as downloading status) when installing a package... my $.02.

interesting ...

I've been using fink (only cli) for years as well, and I've never felt any need to try macports/darwinports, but I've always been curious. Darwinports didn't seem very well maintained, and I haven't given a good look at macports. However, as many have said, fink is constantly updated via selfupdate. It's been stable on OS X for years.

I have found it to be very up to date from the majority of the packages I use -- provided that you use the unstable branch. The thing about the unstable branch -- I've never had any trouble with apps and believe it to be a misnomer.

clevin said:

Fink's packages are extremely old, for the pace of linux, you will miss a lot of exciting things with those old binary packages.

clevin said:

my impression is compilation takes days for a app. can't do that..

Click to expand...

As someone else has pointed out, this is not true for the majority of the software on most reasonably modern hardware. Plus there are precompiled binaries for many packages as well.

Click to expand...

macports is now a Google Summer of Code project, which is very nice! Also, their bug trac system is much better than fink, which has basically no system in place at all (just the devel mailing list).

It would be nice if these projects would just merge. They do the same thing and a lot of effort is being duplicated.