More vitriolic email…
I used Fink (install linux packages on OSX) to install Subversion (a CVS improvement/alternative) on the 12in PowerBook on Wednesday. The process went quite smoothly, particularly when you consider that this is the only install/compile I’ve ever seen where the compile took 4 hours. In my experience something that takes 4 hours to compile doesn’t usually finish, but at the end of all that time I had a handful of subversion binaries that work on OS X. (Now, I’ve written 3000 line PL/SQL procedures that ran for 24 hours, but that’s a whole different ball game. My stored procs were simply free of any hint of optimization while I think Fink’s approach to creative de-optimization was to compile everything in the world… the darwin kernel, itself, do a bit of seti, encode some mp3’s, then compile svn 😉 … then discard 9.9/10th’s of it… but it did work, so I’m really not complaining.)
As an aside, Subversion may have jumped the gun a bit in shutting down their cvs repository while still requiring that you get an svn binary in order to bootstrap and get latest… bit of a chicken and the egg problem that could have been avoided by putting an old source tree on cvs? I say this only because it looks like they specifically shut down their cvs repository a few releases ago. I don’t know the whole story, but it looks like the client-side of the binaries totals to a grand 2mb zipped. That’s a lot of Fink compiling for a little app…
This afternoon I was back at the Fink site reading their docs to see if Fink was a simple method for creating OSX installers (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s not) and found this email exchange between the Fink and OpenOSX project owners. Some highlights:
Well, what you did can be roughly compared to downloading RedHat Linux from their ftp site, making some minor modifications (say, new boot disks and a streamlined installer), and then selling the result on CDs without mentioning RedHat in any way.
>Fink doesn’t install XDarwin or X-Windows for you, our product does.
Look again. Fink _can_ install XFree86 for you, even the months-old
version you’ve used. (So much for assumptions.)
Anyway, I thought it was a good read.
Reminds me of some of the fun Alex has been having recently.