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Gnu-darwin and caution
Authored by: SOX on Jan 02, '03 01:19:45AM

Hi, In my terse list of unix customizations, I delberately omitted any mention of Gnu darwin--either posistive or negative comments. My purpose was to steer a new unix user away from gnu-darwin, at least at first, but not to openly disparage it.

They can of course install it later if they still feel they need it, but I feel its not a wise move to steer a newbie convert to it. installing gnu-darwin is a big step for several reasons. first gnu-darwin is very un-mac-like in its philosphy. it sprays files all over the place, tends to be an all-or-nothing install, and is hard to uninstall completely. worse, it overwrites critical mac intrinsic commands like make and, I believe, tar, which renders many things broken (e.g. fink and many mac configure scripts).

Gnu-darwin is philosophically a replacement for OSX not an augmentation, though it is often spoken of as the latter, and does serve that purpose. Finally, Unix users should make the effort to stick with the mac way organizing the file system and config files till they get used to understanding the native BSD unix system and not get the distinctions between native and Gnu-add-ons blurred. After all when they go to use other macs, it will be rare to find the Gnu-darwin tools.

Fortunately, not installing gnu darwin presents very few handicaps as Fink pretty much has all the tools you (really) need. I expect that it is only a temporary condition that a handful of major packages are ported only to gnu-darwin; they will soon be in Fink.

lastly there is the small point that Gnu-darwin project is having a hissy fit and is no longer supporting the mac platform (yes this is true). Again I think highlights the philosophical differences: gnu-darwin is a great replacement for OSX, but not a (freindly) add-on.

So rather than get into a fight over philosophy, I just decided it was better not to bring it up this confusing issue.



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