MacPorts on Linux

Ben Greenfield ben at cogs.com
Sat Dec 17 08:26:33 PST 2011


On Dec 17, 2011, at 3:44 AM, Niels Dettenbach (Syndicat IT&Internet) wrote:

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> Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> schrieb:
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>> might be wondering as well, so I'm Cc'ing the mailing list) what made
>> you decide to run MacPorts on Linux. First, I was surprised you
>> succeeded in installing MacPorts on Linux at all; I thought that had
>> broken. But more than that, as you're discovering, a lot of ports and
>> portgroups are written on the assumption that they are running on OS X,
>> or at least Darwin. It will probably take significant effort to remove
>> that assumption, and I'm not convinced it's worth the effort, since
>> MacPorts is, as suggested by its name, made to run on Mac OS X, not on
>> Linux or FreeBSD or other systems. Are none of the existing standard
>> ways of getting software onto a Linux system suitable?
> 
> This would be nice to hear here - i.e. why do you did not used port systems like pkgsrc or Gentoo portage which officially provide linux environments?
> 
> But another point here may be - why MacPorts (which is by principe developed and maintained for Mac OS X only) afaik did not cooperate nor participate on well driven / maintained ports projects like pkgsrc?

It may be surprising to hear that pkgsrc for netbsd was derived from the FreeBSD Ports system which was created by Jordan Hubbard the same person responsible for DarwinPorts/MacPorts.  They are very related and where they don't overlap I believe it is for platform specific reasons. I think that each system, pkgsrc, ports, MacPorts is suppose to manage the platform specific building process while drawing on the large pool of available open source software. I always consider the part of creating a port file as very platform specific part to make use of the posix software out there.
10 years of pkgsrc - pkgsrc and the concepts of package management 1997-2007 (part 1)
Jordan Hubbard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks,

Ben



> As far as i understand pkgsrc still targets an open list of unixoide / posix operating systems like Linux and BSDs (and afaik even proprietary operating systems) on different hardware platforms. These realizes a potentially large users and developers audience with different operating systems, but at the time no Mac OS X.
> 
> How can MacPorts participate on pkgsrc in the future and how far could that make any sense? From what i understand directly participating directly on pkgsrc could further merge users into larger audiences?
> 
> Maintaining ports for pkgsrc and macports currently are two completely different things and maintaining ports is a huge, ressource consuming job at all. Afaik MacPorts in parts hold ports only available / make sense on Mac OS X, but most ports are even available on other platforms.
> 
> So, does it make sense to i.e. extend pkgsrc towards Mac OS X or making macports in any way more compatible to pkgsrc ports or cooperate with pkgsrc stronger in any other way?
> 
> Pls don't flame if im completely on a wrong way here - i just try to understand the situation.
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> cheers,
> 
> 
> Niels.
> 
> - --
> Niels Dettenbach
> Syndicat IT&Internet
> http://www.syndicat.com
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