[X-Newbies]

[Philip J Robar]

On Nov 4, 2006, at 10:47 AM, Steven Rogers wrote:

> On Nov 4, 2006, at 11:47 AM, Leah Aronoff wrote:
>
>> Boy!  None of this sounds like Newbies talk to me.  It is  
>> incomprehensible to me. . . .
>
> Yeah - that's why I said "MacPorts is another package system like  
> Fink" - for the purposes of this list, that's what it is.
>
> Package systems are supposed to make installing and updating  
> software that comes from the developer community work like "magic",  
> the way Software Update works. For the user who wants it to just  
> work without understanding all the details, I think MacPorts will be  
> slightly more "magical" than Fink.

This is the point I was ultimately trying to make. If a new user uses  
Fink to install a command line UNIX or X11 program than they end up  
with an command line environment that will be subtly and confusingly  
different from OS X's command line environment. A new users would be  
much better off using MacPorts, unless the program they were after was  
only available via Fink, and if they choose to go with Fink I wanted  
them to be aware of this potential confusion.

Fink is great if you explicitly want to have a GNU/Linux like  
environment available on OS X, but for new users MacPorts is the  
better choice because it uses OS X's UNIX facilities instead of  
replacing it with a similar, but subtly different one.


Phil