Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
How well does pkgsrc work on a Mac? I just got one (mostly to deal
with Word and Powerpoint files that Openoffice doesn't handle well),
but of course need to add other software. Should I use pkgsrc?
Macports? Other choices?
(And, perhaps off-topic -- is there any way I can convert my exist file
MacOS system to handle mixed case, or do I have to reinstall from CD?)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
I've had reasonably good luck with pkgsrc on OS X 10.4. I have resisted Fink since my first experiences with it, which were terrible, but that was several years ago and much may have changed. I've resisted MacPorts because I'm used to pkgsrc so I use that.
I find pkgsrc useful for things like apache, php, ruby, postgres, groff, subversion, ghostscript etc. Things below the GUI. Many of these are already in the base system but poorly maintained by Apple. IMO they should remove some of these from their base system.
It doesn't make sense to me to try and build, say, Firefox because it's simply too much work when you have a binary installer readily available.
Something that would be amazing for pkgsrc (and I know its in there somewhere) is to have the ability to build applications to execute in the native GUI; for example qt-based packages can be built with qt-mac.
I've built binaries, put them on ftp (internal) and tried to indoctrinate some of my peers at work... but no real takers yet. Maybe someday soon :)
As far as the case-sensitive thing - you can bootstrap with --ignore-case-check (IIRC). Most things don't have a problem with that. But that's second-best, I know. You can format a partition or external drive with diskutil(8). You can also create a disk image and format that case-sensitive. But you can't switch the case-sensitive-ness on the fly as far as I know. The problem with going case sensitive is that certain commercial software. Adobe's stuff fails miserably with case-sensitivity, for example.
Louis