OS X package management
Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends:
“But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. “
I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library.
On OS X I have been using MacPorts from the terminal. It provides similar features to apt-get but you don’t get update notifications without diving into the terminal. And I rarely dive into the terminal to manually check for updates.
So, I googled around for a decent GUI and found Porticus. Porticus provides a nice GUI, checks for package updates and with a few clicks you can have your environment up to date. It even integrates nicely with Growl. The big difference is of course that packages aren’t pre-compiled (does that disqualify the use of “packages” to describe them?). MacPorts will download the source and build it on your machine. This is strange as Mac platforms are well known and vary little. Why not save everyone the build step and just push the universal binaries?
Ok, the original linked article was written by a troll.
MacPorts is as good as any other package manager. Does Apple “has” to do it? Nope, that’s why we have an open source community in the first place, right? apt-get was not invented by the Ubuntu guys, they just bundled it in, which is smart. There are several other distros with varying degrees of flexibility and comprehensive library. Yum/RPM comes to mind, Ports from FreeBSD.
So, I would say this guy to get a life (I didn’t find a comment space at the original article which makes me the troll theory strong as he doesn’t want contrary argument).
Great article. MacPorts and Porticus are great open source achievements. Hope the absence of Quartz, iLife, iWork, Adobe products, etc is worth the apt-get.
Have you taken a look at Rudix (http://rudix.org)? It doesn’t have as huge a package library as MacPorts, but they are precompiled universal binaries.
MacPort variants are enough reason to not provide binary packages.
@AkitaOnRails: Ah, yes, that “troll” is Mark Pilgrim. Perhaps you’ve heard of him and his wonderful invention called “grammar”? But I digress.
Yes, the Ubuntu guys didn’t invent apt-get. But they did bundle it, thus making it a de-facto standard. Thus, when people want an Ubuntu user to install something, they just tell them to apt-get install it. They don’t tell the user to muck around with .dmg’s and such nonsense. Even better, since Ubuntu does bundle a very good package manager and uses it for quite literally everything up to OS upgrades, there aren’t fifty incompatible replacements for it, all of which require a different registration/installation/packaging/upgrade path.
@pianohacker
Mark Pilgrim is indeed a troll. It is laughable to spend 20 years of your computing life and suddenly discover you were dancing with the devil (and make a name on the internet blogosphere with that “discovery”). Yes indeed, he should get a life.
Know what’s more funnier though? He scorns the fact that to become and ADC member “you give up your rights”, but did you now he had to sign the same kind of contract giving up his rights when he went to work for Google? I guess you didn’t. But I digress.
And what’s the nonsense about a dmg anyway? Guess it must be too diffciult to mount a disk image and copy a file to a folder…