DarwinPorts 1.2 has been released. “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). There are currently about 3038 completed and usable ports, with more being added on a regular basis.”
I’ve switched to darwinports from Fink some time ago. And I like it much better. The main reasons being ports/packages are updated sooner because the maintainers don’t have to compile a debian package but only update a port file. And writing port files is really easy.
I’ve never had a problem with darwinports and it’s just getting better.
I think this is great and their work is commendable.
Apart from the ports’ use on OS X, I am wondering and would be greateful to anyone who would contribute in answering this, what people is Darwin targeted at. It doesn’t so much need to be targeted at anyone, it is the os x core after all, but still I wonder what people use Darwin outside of os x. For instance the streaming server could was found to be the best but noone would switch for just something like that.
cheers
u take care people and be good
god bless
“what people is Darwin targeted at.”
See below:
Who would want to use OpenDarwin?
OpenDarwin in its current state is not a fully-featured operating system that is recommended to be deployed on production machines. While it could be used on a web server, there are many other operating systems that are far more mature, better supported and so on. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to use OpenDarwin as a web server — the releases even include Apache httpd by default — it’s just that you might find it more effort to set up and configure it than other operating systems.
While it is possible to use OpenDarwin as a desktop machine, again you may find it’s not the best choice. However, OpenDarwin includes X11 and a wide range of software (including fully-fledged desktop environments like KDE and GNOME) can be installed using DarwinPorts. Just don’t expect a trouble-free, high-performance multimedia machine.
Hardware support is patchy at best, especially on x86. As Apple does not produce Mac OS X for x86 there has not been such a big investment in producing the drivers for all the diverse hardware configurations out there in the x86 world as there has been on ensuring that everything runs well on recent PowerPC-based Mac systems.
So, OpenDarwin’s target audience at the moment is definitely the developer/power user crowd. There are those coming from OS X looking to learn more about the core of their operating system and find out why things work as they do, look at source to help them better understand what’s going on under the hood so they can improve their products, and so on. There are also those coming from other UNIX-like operating systems that are interested in the advanced features and technologies Darwin offers.
In the long-term, we’d love to see OpenDarwin up to par with the rest of the BSD family, so that a person of sound mind would be perfectly able to choose it as a web server or desktop machine. We believe that the technology it’s based on is very sound, and is constantly undergoing improvements and developments at the hands of Apple.
From:
http://www.opendarwin.org/en/faq/ch01.html#who_would_use
Edited 2005-12-16 00:32
Any ideas on what the switch to intel will to to Darwin Ports and Fink?
This switch will not effect darwinports at all. But it will effect Fink because Fink provides binaries while darwinports doesn’t. The way darwinports works is it follows the rules in a PortFile to download/configure/compile/install a source archive.
Hey all…
I just downloaded and took the opportunity to play around with the most recent release of DarwinPorts, and well, it works well… The only minor problem I have found is that by default, most (if not all) of the scripts are designed to be compiled on a PPC system – a quick change with the text editor resolves that, but hopefully, a more universal fix will be implemented…
How does this compare to pkg-src?
If NetBSD’s pkg-src package manager is modern and supports numerous operating systems, why reinvent the wheel?
I believe DarwinPorts was the vision of Apple employee, FreeBSD guru, Jordan Hubbard. There was difficulty in adapting ‘ports’ to Darwin, so a new system was invisaged. More info here:
http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/DarwinPorts:About
If NetBSD’s pkg-src package manager is modern and supports numerous operating systems, why reinvent the wheel?
Their concern was never to create a package system that would be universally adopted outside of Darwin(a possibility, but not a prime objective). Rather, something that might “value-add” with respect to OS X.
Actually, the primary architects were Kevin Van Vechten and Landon Fuller. Landon Fuller worked for Apple at the time, and Kevin Van Vechten was later hired.
What I would love to see is a move alway from X11 in regards to Qt – I mean, we already have Qt on Quartz, so why not make the ports possible using Qt-Quartz rather than relying on X11?
A couple of reasons:
First, making quartz-qt apps isn’t even as simple as a recompile. It’s a lot of manual work that is beyond the scope of DarwinPorts.
Many people want to use Darwin as a standalone OS. without quartz so quartz-qt only would not be beneficial.
Just another great Tcl (or Tcl/Tk if you use PortAuthority) application.
Just thought I would point that out.
You can get the download also from: <a href=www.darwinports.com>darwinports.com