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Suggestion
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Nov 25, '03 09:21:16PM

As a general rule: Always use fink packages and avoid these funky packaging things like MacGIMP and the i-installer. Most apple software and good party software uses the Macs built in ppackage tracking system, which while it appears vastly inferior to fink's dpkg, does allows basic package managment operations.. and can help you resolve conflicts. Fink has a seperate (vastely superior) package managment system AND it avoids the main Mac OS X tree, but other third party installers, like the i-installer, will use their own package mangment system (or no package mangment system) AND tehy install into the /usr tree. This is just plain stupid and assking for trouble. Even if your third party installer knows lots about Macs, a single Apple automatic update could overwrite one of its files and send all sorts of things crashing down. Just say no. If these people were at all sane they would be using fink like everything else.



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Suggestion
Authored by: Spades on Nov 26, '03 11:36:06AM
It's ok to use /usr/local. Apple should not be touching it. From the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard:
The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated.
In fact, my own suggestion is to avoid fink because it "avoids" the main OS X tree. As you can see, the whole reason /usr/local exists is for things like fink, and i-Installer. It's difficult for applications outside of fink to make use of fink libraries and applications because it is outside of the standard tree. If fink installed in /usr/local instead, a bin/init.csh script would be unnecesary.

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Suggestion
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Jan 09, '04 01:12:04PM

Any given install tree needs a package management system. The /usr tree should bee managed by Apple's managment system, the /sw tree should be managed by dpkg, and /usr/local usually needs to be managed by hand.. a big pain in the arse.

Besides nobody has trouble using fink if you configure it properly, like by actuallly running its initscripts and being careful about use of enviroment variables.

I find that I'm better off with almost all fink stuff, though I have a /sw/local/bin directory which is the very first thing in my path and occasinally I need to place a symlink there wheen some program in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin needs to run before a program in /sw/bin.. a very rare occurance indeed.



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Suggestion
Authored by: Jim Hu on Nov 26, '03 12:43:37PM

I agree with Spades - fink would be fine if everything was released for fink - but it isn't, and lots of things that work in OSX work their way into fink slowly.

This means that sometimes, despite editing default paths and so on, things that you want to install - with CPAN, for example - just don't work with other things you installed with fink, unless you go in and edit config files all the time.

I thought fink was great at first, but now that I've learned how to install stuff into /usr/local CPAN works much better, and CPAN seems to update much more frequently than fink.



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