Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.pcisys.net!news.pcisys.net.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:24:23 -0500 From: Tom Harrington Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps Subject: Re: Fink Organization: Atomic Bird References: User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.1 (Intel Mac OS X) Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:24:22 -0600 Message-ID: Lines: 47 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-PCtiOyJ3vEbuGX+DmcZj28g+DRljwicfwttKDoX3qb7a2T9dMD96ClruzxD4oarfZVtkVOKk86O6qpN!LzFBld59wOPWWK3krPvDWFF+cInK2YUU42uMisjJORoUjXwF/6bSwp+Nm+tnz9fnnfJ6kTq7JSxO!T1LcdA== X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3131 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.sys.mac.apps:1277 In article , Dan C wrote: > Hello all, > > Long time Linux user, just got my first iMac (21.5" version). Quite > impressed so far... Somebody told me about "Fink", website here: > > http://www.finkproject.org/index.php?phpLang=en > > ...and wondering what some of you experienced users think of it. Seems > like a cool way to run some open-source apps that are not natively > available on the Mac. For instance, the 'Pan' newsreader that I am fond > of in Linux, would love to be able to run that on the Mac. > > Any thoughts on this Fink thing? Does it work well? Thanks. Fink was OK, and so was MacPorts. More recently I've used HomeBrew (https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew). In general, how well these schemes work depend on how deep the dependency tree runs. Simple command line tools, usually no problem. More dependencies lead to more potential problems. Once you get up to the level where Gnome or GTK are in the mix I found them to be hit or miss at best. There's almost always something buried somewhere in the dependency tree that doesn't build out of the box. I was usually attempting to build gnucash, which is apparently the acid test of this approach, and the test failed quite often. I also found that ports listed on the projects' web sites would often turn out not to actually work, so any information you find on what's available should be considered as potentially wrong. They're least useable just after a major release of Mac OS X-- I've had to keep one Mac running an outdated version of Mac OS X at times because the porting projects took a while to catch up (I'd try to help with the updating but that's not my forte as a developer and after literally days of work I'd eventually give up). Similar problems can crop up after a major update to Apple's developer tools, which the porting projects rely on. Eventually I decided this was too much trouble and I mostly gave up on them. Gnucash has a pre-built version that I can just download and run with no issues, so that's what I do now. -- Tom "Tom" Harrington Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002 http://www.atomicbird.com/