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On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 11:43:22PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > As for OSX packaging... it's not a "package system" like the BSD ports > system, but then neither is RPM, and neither were Debian packages for > many years. I have been told Debian packages have gotten to the point > where you can just install a package and have it automatically pull in > everything it needs, but that sure wasn't the case back when I was > actively looking at switching to Linux in the '90s, Apt was released with Debian 2.1 in 1999. > and it sure as hell > wasn't the case for Red Hat last June. Red Hat has had Up2date (for corporate use) and Yum and even Apt-get for a few years now. Certainly since last June. All of them will let you pull down a package and all of its dependencies. Both Debian and Red Hat treat the management of installed packages and the tracking of available packages as logically separate tasks and built separate tools to do the latter, rather than extending rpm or dpkg. This still seems to be catching some people out. Frankly, the packaging systems for the main Linux distributions are more powerful and sophisticated than those of the various decendants of 386BSD. This isn't so relevant for FreeBSD or OpenBSD, since they are more integrated and centrally managed than any Linux distribution. Different story with OSX, though, where the multiplicity of official packaging systems (so not counting fink) makes for a real mess IMO. I'm used to being able to track the ownership and purpose of any file outside /home or /var. Installing a package by drag-and-drop is a nice feature but there's no reason why that could not have been integrated with decent package management. That's something that both Gnome and KDE offered back in the 90s, ironically. As long as OS X's customer base is mostly the non-technical and Unix geeks who are tired of worrying how their desktop is configured, I don't suppose it matters so much. Those who do care can run Debian on their powerbooks. -- Bruce Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards, apart from ostriches if you punch them hard enough.There's stuff above here
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