Re: "Debian Within a Darwin System"
On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 06:10:28PM +0100, jesi@jinxt.net wrote:
} On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 10:18:02AM -0400, Scott Henson wrote:
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} > "Michael" <t3tx90j02@sneakemail.com> writes:
} >
} > > On the Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC PowerMac Page
} > > (http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/pmac) the second
} > > paragraph closes by mentioning that "Shortly, you may also have
} > > the option of running Debian within a Darwin system." What
} > > exactly does that statement mean, and when is shortly? Thank you
} > > for your help.
}
} I think this is connected to project called fink.
Someone has already mentioned that no, Fink is unrelated to Debian
except insofar as they ported apt to darwin. As a user of both Debian
and Fink on MacOS X, I can tell you that Fink is distinctly inferior to
Debian, and probably always will be.
There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that the strength
and power of Debian comes from clearly stated policies which are
followed consistently, and a huge group of developers willing to
dedicate time and effort to maintaining thousands of packages on
multiple platforms. Fink fails on both counts.
Fink serves too few people (those who use MacOS X, *and* use it as a
Unix/X11 system, *and* like Debian's packaging scheme) to attract the
number of developers Debian has. The Fink developers also made the
mistakes of abandoning Debian's source package format and abandoning its
packaging policies. If they had not, it would be a much easier job to
port a Debian package to Fink; instead, one must start from the upstream
version rather than a Debian package and still produce a package that
will install in the right places and track files properly.
That said, Fink is the best thing going on MacOS X. I used to really
like the BSD ports system (a version of which is available on MacOS X),
but since I started using Debian I am unwilling to go back. I would,
however, abandon Fink in a heartbeat if Debian chose to begin supporting
Darwin.
I can't see Debian supporting MacOS X directly, since I believe there is
some bad blood between Apple and Debian. Darwin, however, is a
reasonable BSD to support, and any work done there could be ported to
MacOS X with relative ease. If the Debian project is considering
including Darwin as a supported platform, I would be delighted.
} Grzesiek
--Greg
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