[Pythonmac-SIG] Pack Man issues on OS X 10.3.4

[Jonathan Wight]

On Jun 04, 2004, at 19:44, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On Jun 4, 2004, at 7:14 PM, Markus W. Weissmann wrote:
>
> Mostly speaking from Fink experience, it feels like a different 
> operating system than Darwin because it has a lot of overlap with the 
> base system.  I don't typically want to install a marginally newer 
> version of something like libxml2 if I don't have to.  It also 
> requires a bootstrap script to be used.. so you essentially have two 
> modes of operation at the shell, depending on whether or not you want 
> to run Fink apps and/or link to Fink libraries.
>
> I like DarwinPorts a lot better, in theory anyway, but I really 
> haven't needed any ports from it... so I don't have real experience 
> using it.  I do have experience with other BSD ports collections 
> (mostly OpenBSD).

I've been using DarwinPorts a lot recently. Mainly as a quick way to 
install and upgrade Subversion and a handful of libraries (libxml2, 
sqlite) that I need during my day job developing (Cocoa) software. I 
switched to DarwinPorts from Fink a year ago mainly because Fink just 
grated on me and because Jordan Hubbard is one of the leaders on the 
DarwinPorts project - I was hoping DarwinPorts would be more 'mac-like' 
than Fink.

On the whole it is a nice system, you certainly can't beat "port 
install svn". It seems to have a broad selection of packages available 
and configuration of new packages is straight-forward (unfortunately it 
is tightly bound to TCL).

I have a couple of problems with DarwinPorts though. The first is that 
the tools seem quite immature, the programs seem missing quite a few 
useful options and the built-in help is limited. to top it off you have 
to manually update your port files by updating them from cvs yourself.

My second main problem is that, like Bob points out with Fink, it seems 
like a second operating system. Again it will install its own version 
of tools and libraries you already have installed, for example if you 
install sqlite with python bindings DarwinPorts will install its own 
version of Python 2.3! Needless to say this is a pain in the butt. This 
might be fine on a pure Darwin system but with Mac OS X this is just 
plain crazy. I think maybe this will get fixed in the future (there was 
a thread on the DarwinPorts mailing list discussing this a while ago) 
but right now the immaturity of DarwinPorts stands out.

I'm sticking with DarwinPorts because I really hope it gets better. But 
as to the original question about using DarwinPorts (or Fink) as 
Python's package management system it seems to me that Python & PackMan 
are doing the right thing already and just need to be fixed.

	Jon.