Editorial  

Apple in OpenSourceLand

Part II

As I mentionned in my fist article, I've been falling a long time but my introduction to free software in Mac OS X was greatly helped by existing projects. One of them was Fink. It was written "try me" on it. So I tried it and began feeling smaller and smaller (not smarter though). Or was it this project created by Christoph Pfisterer that was growing enormously ? Over 20 developpers now working on the system and packages. Over 60 additionnal persons have since contributed more or less to the creation and maintenance of packages.

Fink people have worked very hard to provide full dynamic shared libraries and very good documentation. Working with dynamically loaded shared libraries and objects on Mac OS X is probably the first major problem one encounters with unix applications. Fink does provide though full implementation of all these with all the consequences of dependencies across many versions that come along. That is why you will come across many splitted packages, to allow shared libraries be independent of executables (the shlibs splitoff).

They also have built a very comprehensive documentation with many things to learn either for the total beginner and for the programmer who wishes himself to port some unix application. This is the best source of valuable information on many subjects including using X11, using fink (why not ?), porting unix applications and packaging your ports for fink (why not again ?). They also have very active mailing lists where many users are better than being alone, especially when you are floating in a bottle through a sea of tears.

Speaking of users, fink provides quite a few debian tools such as apt-get for using pre-compiled stuff instead of having it all built on your machine (which may means hours, hours and hours of whistling CPU, which may also mean strange and stranger errors once in a while). There is also dselect, designed to be more user-friendly than apt-get but in my experience, I hated it. Spent much more time wondering how to work it out than actually working it out. Then there is also the Fink Commander, a Cocoa GUI application (Mac OS X native graphical user's interface) that provides a front-end to both fink and apt-get methods. It works well but it can't beat command line versatility of course. All this may seem a little obscure but just "try it" and you might very well find yourself dancing around a rock quite soon !

Yves de Champlain