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From: jonathon on 18 Jun 2006 20:43
I've seen some open source stuff that builds right out of the box, but
they still have ports available.

For example, there's a Fink port for PostgreSQL, but it also works fine
building it on its own. Why is this?

From: Bob Harris on 18 Jun 2006 22:01
In article
<1150677795.619217.300050(a)g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
"jonathon" <j_mckitrick(a)bigfoot.com> wrote:

> I've seen some open source stuff that builds right out of the box, but
> they still have ports available.
>
> For example, there's a Fink port for PostgreSQL, but it also works fine
> building it on its own. Why is this?

Because Fink offers, binaries, as well as dependency resolution,
and has a GUI interface (Fink Commander) that makes it very easy
to download and install.

And while Fink is not "One Stop Shopping", they are trying to be,
so that means they need to have as many ports as possible. If the
package installs clean without Fink, then it is even easier for
Fink to include it.

Bob Harris
From: D P Schreber on 20 Jun 2006 08:36
On 2006-06-19, Warren Oates <warren.oates(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Some of us need a few things that don't come with a "stock" OS X, but we
> don't need all the stuff that comes with Fink or DarwinPorts, or the
> space it takes up, so we only download the stuff we're interested in,
> and build it and maintain it ourselves.

The porting packages also introduce issues of their own due to the fact
that they need to be kept in totally separate, self-contained trees to
avoid conficting with Apple updates. In general I recommend avoiding
them unless you need a _lot_ of things. Version and dependency tracking
is very nice in principle but it doesn't work well in practice in osx
(compared to linux, where the these tools are fully integrated with the
distros). If you need, say, 20 ports or less, it's definitely easier
and more flexible to build them yourself. And as noted above, the
overhead doesn't make a lot sense anyway in that case.

As for why the porting packages include software that doesn't require
any patching to build in osx, one reason that I think hasn't been
mentioned yet is that they have to in order to keep track of
dependencies properly.
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