[Fink-devel] Re: Darwin/MacOSX packages, why so many ways ?

[Jordan H. <jk...@op...>]

I think this is more than a little idealistic and probably not even a 
practical suggestion at this stage.  Assuming for a moment that we all 
even agreed that there was such a thing as "one true infrastructure" 
among us which we all liked and wanted to rush to adopt, we still don't 
have anything close to feature-parity in the set of ports/packages we 
provide and the users of any one of these systems (particularly 
GNU/Darwin or Fink, who have far more "ports") would seriously lose out 
in any rush to slam ourselves together and break the world in any 
number of ways until we managed to get all the way back to where we 
were before.

Speaking just for darwinports, I can also say that it's a very young 
project with a lot of its own growing to do and the last thing we need 
right now is the distraction of trying to define a single, merged 
architecture in a committee of dozens with probably as many ideas as to 
how to go about it.  If we wanted to self-immolate that would probably 
be a fine way to go about it, but we're just not that interested in 
getting out the matches and gasoline right now. :-)

The OpenPackages project, long moribund but perhaps with some new life, 
has just announced that they're adopting darwinports 
(http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200210/ - ref From the editor) and promise 
to do so in a non-disruptive manner, so let's see how that pans out 
first.  If they can port it to *BSD and people in that community even 
find it in any way compelling, that will be useful empirical evidence 
in planning any future moves.

- Jordan

On Thursday, October 3, 2002, at 04:45 AM, Ludovic Hirlimann wrote:

> Howdy,
> as of today three groups of developers are working on the same subject 
> : bringing free unix applications to Darwin/MacosX.
> IMHO there is a waste of resource here for the everyone. Because when 
> One package gets "ported", some work it still todo to bring that piece 
> of software from ,one project to another, but that work should be 
> minimal (ie adapting the package format). In the meantime three 
> diffrent person might be working on the same "port" : two person's 
> work is wasted and could be used in porting other applications, 
> working on other core tasks.
> Would it be possible to unite all those efforts ? I would like to have 
> a *unique* dtabase containing the name of the software being ported 
> and which group is porting the software. When a application is ported 
> by a group and works correctly then a mail is sent to the other 
> groups, mail which might be catched up by a robot and that would 
> change the packaging format to the one used by the project.
>
> Do you think this would be doable ?
> If so are the different parties interested ?
>
> Darwin should be like FreeBSD and looks like linux because of those 
> different projetcs. We should unite now , when it's easier to do then 
> later when it will be harder to unite those porting efforts.
>
> [sorry for the cross-post, I suggest using darwinports for the 
> follow-ups]
> Ludo
> -- 
> http://islande.hirlimann.net
>
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--
Jordan K. Hubbard
Engineering Manager, BSD technology group
Apple Computer