Re: More Mac cloning progress

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 4 March 2016 at 21:44,  <pl...@pi...> wrote:
>
> Advanced package managers on Linux systems tend to take care of this
> kind of thing and ensure all software installed is consistent.  From
> others comments this is clearly not the case on MacOSX.

It's just that one doesn't come by default. One can still install a
third party package manager.

> The LInux
> package managers  manage the dependency hell you are likely to encounter.

To be fair, Linux would not be much different in this particular case.
Assume that one would want to provide a patched gnuplot binary to
students running linux. The fact that linux is great at managing
dependencies is actually useless in this case because the one
providing the binaries doesn't know whether the target machine has
wxWidgets 2.8 or 3.0 installed for example (the same problem for any
other dependency), so in order to be able to provide linux binaries,
one would either have to ship all the dependencies along with the
binary (not much different from what many are criticising about OS X)
or build one package per each version of each linux distribution that
should be supported.


What Allin provided is *the* solution that should be used to
distribute gnuplot for OS X. No libraries conflict with each other (it
doesn't clutter the user's system and cluttering the system won't
affect Gnuplot.app), it is super easy to handle and just works.

Thomas, if what Allin provided doesn't satisfy your needs for one
reason or another or if you want to be able to build it independently,
try to at last replicate what he did with a potentially different set
of libraries.

Mojca