Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 65.196.150.2]
on February 22, 2008 01:06 PM
The Fink and MacPorts projects are somewhat similar, but are independent from one another. I assume Fink Commander is a front-end for Fink and doesn't interact with MacPorts, but I haven't looked at it.
I develop two free educational games (TuxMath and TuxType - www.tux4kids.com) and recently bought a Mac and started working on getting up-to-date MacOSX builds. I started with Fink, but found that some of the libs and dev tools were not current enough to build my project. More importantly from a developer standpoint, Fink does not have an option to install universal binaries. The MacPorts project seems to be way more up-to-date. There seems to be more spare-time involvement of Apple engineers in MacPorts than in Fink. It is also much simpler for developers to contribute programs to MacPorts than to Fink. You don't have to set up and mirror a custom build - all you do is write a very brief recipe (a.k.a. Portfile) for downloading the original source and building on the user's machine. I've added TuxMath to MacPorts, and hope to do the same with TuxType soon.
Having said that, I think Fink is also a great project, and would be happy to add my programs to it at some point.
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But does Fink Commander work with MacPorts?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 65.196.150.2] on February 22, 2008 01:06 PMI develop two free educational games (TuxMath and TuxType - www.tux4kids.com) and recently bought a Mac and started working on getting up-to-date MacOSX builds. I started with Fink, but found that some of the libs and dev tools were not current enough to build my project. More importantly from a developer standpoint, Fink does not have an option to install universal binaries. The MacPorts project seems to be way more up-to-date. There seems to be more spare-time involvement of Apple engineers in MacPorts than in Fink. It is also much simpler for developers to contribute programs to MacPorts than to Fink. You don't have to set up and mirror a custom build - all you do is write a very brief recipe (a.k.a. Portfile) for downloading the original source and building on the user's machine. I've added TuxMath to MacPorts, and hope to do the same with TuxType soon.
Having said that, I think Fink is also a great project, and would be happy to add my programs to it at some point.
David Bruce (dbruce@tampabay.rr.com)
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