Re: [tlug] Advice on buying a Macbook

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Al Hoang writes:

 > 	I'm not sure I agree here as 'it worked for me'.  But
 > my standards for what I considered 'good enough' are probably
 > very different from your standards.

Well, basically my experience most of the time was similar to yours.

However for those packages I work on or need multiple versions of, I
want to be able to fool the package system into thinking that my
versions satisfy the dependencies.  This is hard to do reliably with
apt/dpkg-based systems.  (In both directions; it's hard to fool dpkg,
and if you do, it's likely to whack you on the knuckles for it---I've
had it overwrite configs for my local builds on occasion, with the
"XML chrome is foobar" effect familiar to all Mozilla users.)

I also found that at the time (two years ago) version skew was often a
serious problem with several of the packages I wanted to use; the
dependencies were not available in Fink at the version needed.

 > 	Don't you need to run the UFS filesystem (case-preserving 
 > behavior needed for some pieces of pkgsrc) to take advantage of
 > pkgsrc on OS X?

Dunno; I haven't really tried because I've got too much invested in
MacPorts at this point. :-(  What my experience has been to date for
small-scale experiments, though, is that no, it's not really that much
of a problem.  The case-insensitivity of HFS+ means that in most cases
where pkgsrc would run into real problems the package simply won't
work.