A look at DarwinPorts

Most of our readers are probably familiar with Fink, which lets you install open source software on Mac OS X. Now there's another alternative: DarwinPorts.

Although DarwinPorts has been in development for several years, the first binary release became available in April. I've been using Fink since 10.1 but I recently switched to DarwinPorts after installing a product which required it. The two systems can co-exist, since they store their products in different locations.

Unlike Fink, which requires the software to be built & packaged, DarwinPorts fetches the standard source code, applies patches specific to OS X, and builds the software. DarwinPorts places all of its files in /opt/local rather than Fink's /sw. There are currently many more packages available through DarwinPorts than Fink, which has been very slow in adding Tiger support for most packages.

If you'd like to use Fink & DarwinPorts, you can add code like this to your .bashrc to test for and set the proper paths for Fink, DarwinPorts, or both.

if [ -f /sw/bin/init.sh ]
then
    . /sw/bin/init.sh
fi

if [ -f /opt/local/bin/port ]
then
    append_path PATH /opt/local/bin
    append_path MANPATH /opt/local/share/man
fi

append_path PATH /Developer/Tools
append_path PATH ~/bin

You can download DarwinPorts from http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/.