Rich Cook wrote:
Not exactly. The problem with fink is that you can't guarantee that it
exists on any particular box. The same thing would happen no matter
if you
had it install things in /sw or /usr/local. The same would be true for
DarwinPorts.
This is exactly my point. Surely one uses a commercial OS be it
Windows, MacOS, HP-UX, Solaris whatever, so that you can get 'shrink
wrap' software, install and run with no hassle. There are plenty of
perfectly good reasons to use GNU/Linux. What I cannot understand is
any reason to try and turn MacOS X into Linux.
What Bill Northcott was suggesting instead was:
Darwin/MacOS X has really neat ways of letting you package everything
you need into an application bundle or a Framework and not trample on
anything else in the system, which does not suck.
In that way, you'd carry all dependent libraries inside your own
Framework
or bundle and wouldn't have to worry about external dependencies.
While I like this solution for the most part, I see are three potential
problems:
1) You start bloating the disk. If 10 different binaries contained
the VTK
libraries, for instance, in their bundles, you end up taking up 10
times
the disk space that you otherwise would need.
2) You start bloating memory. I presume that Darwin wouldn't know
that the
10 individual VTK libraries are actually the same thing, and would
load
separate copies into memory at each binary invocation.
3) I don't know how this works for regular UNIX binaries that aren't
packaged in a bundle. I supposed you could still use the Framework
method and link against that, but I am just ignorant about how that
would
work.
The issue is one of practice. Once a number of people find that they
are loading multiple instances of the same library, they hassle Apple
to include it. Apple appear to be amenable to including more GNU stuff
as long as there is demonstrated demand. Panther introduced many new
packages including libiconv and libxml2. That is very different from
the Linux (Fink) approach of 'throw in everything just in case.' That
is a route to low quality and unpredictability in the final mixture.
Bill Northcott
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