Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:25:43 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <cremes.devlist@mac.com> Cc: Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu>, Lonnie Cumberland <lonnie@outstep.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD? Message-ID: <002701c70c85$db821eb0$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645> References: <454E9F7B.5010105@outstep.com> <454EB6D6.3030807@infowest.com> <454EBEEC.1060002@u.washington.edu> <454F210C.9000602@outstep.com> <004001c70706$0d571ec0$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645> <62104DC1-8AD2-41E1-B469-51CAC91A8D8B@mac.com>
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----- Original Message ----- From: <cremes.devlist@mac.com> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: "Lonnie Cumberland" <lonnie@outstep.com>; "Garrett Cooper" <youshi10@u.washington.edu>; <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 6:02 AM Subject: Re: MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD? > Ted, you got a couple of things wrong. Read below for the corrections. > > > > The biggest problem with MacOS X is that a lot of UNIX software that > > runs on FreeBSD and such, is not ported to MacOSX, and it's very > > difficult to compile on MacOSX. > > This is completely wrong. Take a look at macports [1] (formerly > darwinports) for a large repository of UNIX software that compiles > very cleanly on OSX. It's nearly 7 years since OSX shipped to the > public. In that time, most opensource software was updated to compile > cleanly on OSX. The primary changes to allow this were to the > "configure" scripts so they recognize darwin as a base OS. If other > patches were necessary, most software maintainers accepted these > patches back into their trunk. > I spent a lot of time trying to build KDE on Panther and end up at a dead end. There's many problems there. A lot I understand were fixed in Tiger and there's somewhat of alpha binaries out there - but they must use magic to build them. In any case, Tiger won't run on anything that doesen't have firewire so you can just toss out your older iMacs right there. Command line programs do compile, but you have to make many changes in some of them. Macports is fine if the program you want is in there. If not and your rolling it yourself, then you better know what your doing. > OSX has excellent support for most UNIX software. > Uh, huh. Yeah, right. There's not a lot of UNIX software out there that supports all the major flavors of UNIX very well, which is why the FreeBSD ports system is so important for FreeBSD. And unfortunately more and more UNIX software is being written and built on Linux and not tested on FreeBSD. Take mysql for example, it's heavily dependent on threads and while the FreeBSD threads implementation is superior to the Linux implementation, mysql didn't work at all with it until recently, and it doesen't work as well as under Linux. Patching the holy hell out of a package to get it to build does NOT mean there's "excellent support" for the package under that UNIX. The package may run fine, in fact, may run better than under Linux or whatever it was developed on, but that does not equal support. Ted
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