After more than two years in the making, DarwinPorts 1.0 is now available in binary and in source form. The DarwinPorts Project’s main goal is to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on the Darwin OS family (OpenDarwin, Mac OS X and Darwin).
I’d love Darwinports to death if it’d .. work.. I’ve tried it several times, but usually i have problems compiling one of the applications I need. I so far never managed to install Gnome, one of the packages always refused to compile, lately i’ve had problems compililing xine, which worked before;
I wonder if my OS X is just fucked, but then again i’ve tried it on 3 different machines (iBook, G5, Mac Mini) and there were always compile problems;
(and yeah, stable apps too)
Why when I’m at work (where most of our servers and my desktop run Gentoo), compiling always works flawlessly.
Well, I’ll try 1.0 now nevertheless, maybe I’ve just had bad cvs releases…
Wow this does sound like a very cool initiative. I had never heard of DawinPorts before. Good stuff apparently.
where does this leave fink?
My experience has been that Fink has never worked very well — pkgsrc, however, did.
Actually, I’ve not had much in the way of problems with Fink. I’ve not used DarwinPorts nor the Gentoo attempt. This is mostly due to fink being the first I’ve tried so I stuck with it.
On the other hand, fink has about 5000 packages in its repository, so if it is selection you need, darwinports may not have it.
From my understanding both fink & darwinports put all of their software in one directory so as not to screw up your system. I’m not sure the gentoo folks do the same. Perhaps someone can throw in their 2 cents.
From my understanding both fink & darwinports put all of their software in one directory so as not to screw up your system.
Fink puts everything under the /sw directory, but AFAIK, DarwinPorts uses /usr/local, much like a typical BSD ports system does.
Generally I’ve found that Darwinports has more up-to-date and multimedia ports than fink, although I haven’t tried the source fink distribution yet.
The main reason I use DarwinPorts however is because it works in a more BSD style manner in comparison to fink’s Linux way. No real difference, simply a preference.
DarwinPorts installed first time for me, just followed the instructions and very simple. Compile times seem quite long on my Powerbook 1.33Ghz though.
Have you tried XinePlayer?
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17492
Each has its pros and cons. With Fink you don’t have to build every package yourself, but it takes them ages to transition packages from unstable (source-based) to stable (binary-based). I like DP more, but it forces me to build everything, which is needlessly tedious.
Oh, also, DP is pretty broken for Tiger:
http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/darwinports/2005-May/025621.htm…
There are a lot of broken packages on Tiger. At the moment, Fink seems to run fine on Tiger, so that’s what I’m using. If you’re on Tiger, fink is pretty much the only choice for now.
DarwinPorts uses /opt/local as least last time I tried (a couple months ago), it does not interfere with /usr/local. It also worked great, in my experience (maybe KDE did not compile correctly but others were fine). More packages than Fink I think, but at least I didn’t see how to get binaries. Also includes Aqua apps like Adium and Cyberduck (although there’s not much point in getting those off DarwinPorts), and frameworks, like SDL and things (maybe Fink does too but I’m sure that DarwinPorts does).
Same thing here. In fact, i first started with fink, and then moved to darwinports. The great thing about darwinport is the direct integration in the main filesystem and i definitely love it. But as in your case, i did experience a lot of broken ports. And have a port crashing after an hour of various dependencies compiling is tiring…
Upgrading to Tiger, i suppose i’ll switch back again to fink. Hopefully, darwinports will become more reliable with time. It is a pretty nice system.
Installed Darwinports yesterday… tried two ports and both of them simply were broken…
Moving to greener pastures.
I’got no problem with Darwinports.
And in comparison with fink everything seems much cleaner and simpler…well like BSD vs Linux
to be Tiger, Tiger breaks things left and right, darwinports is not the exception it is the rule, the same goes for Gentoo.