Comments on: OS X package management

By: Wu Ming

Wu Ming — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:21:12 +0000

@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…

By: pianohacker

pianohacker — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:15:17 +0000

@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.

By: bryanl

bryanl — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:00:56 +0000

Why not save everyone the build step and just push the universal binaries?

MacPort variants are enough reason to not provide binary packages.

By: http://kamui.myopenid.com/

http://kamui.myopenid.com/ — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:21:22 +0000

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.

By: AkitaOnRails

AkitaOnRails — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 11:15:44 +0000

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.