Tales of the Raccoon Fink

(This is a repost of my post to OSNews.) I’m one of the core Fink maintainers and I also maintain some packages (and have even recently done some development) on darwinports, so I hope I at least have a little bit to say about this. 😉 A lot of the comments are saying “why?!?!” Really people, you should know the answer by now. “Why not?” It’s a fun hack, it’s neat, it’s satisfying when you accomplish it. Who needs another reason? If other people get something out of it, great. As for “what this means”, it means another infrastructure for porting packages. Yes, they’re duplicating functionality… I made the same complaints when darwinports started out, but darwinports has done some pretty innovative things and has great plans for the future; I’ve since decided I no longer have the right to ask why — it’s not my place. You’ll find that the “packaging” (ie, making the package description) is the easy part. “Porting” is the hard part, and there is very little overlap in that space. A number of fink and darwinports developers hang out in each other’s irc channels, and there’s a lot of code-sharing that goes on . . . → Read More: Gentoo on MacOSX (or, Shut Your Yapholes You Simpering Idiots!)