pkgsrc on Mac OS X
Amitai Schlair
The NetBSD Project
How usable is it?
- In the latest powerpc bulk build by kristerw@: 4729/6567
- For comparison, from yyamano@'s presentation five years ago: "300 pkgsrc can be compiled without any changes."
- Notably broken: KDE (fixable, Fink has it)
Solved problems
- user(8), group(8) workalike shell scripts
- pkgtools/rc.subr ported
- GNU libtool
- GNU-compatible cpp by default (OS X also has weird cpp)
- automated PLIST handling for *.dylib
- buildlink and wrappers help greatly with portability
- dlcompat provides dlopen(3) compatibility on older systems
- significant cross-platform bootstrap improvements
- regular bulk builds on PowerPC
- increased manpower: general popularity of Macs among developers
Unsolved problems
- pkgsrc still needs case-sensitive filesystem
- individual packages vs. Mac linker
- integrating rc.d scripts into boot process
- difficult to sync pkgtools/rc.subr with the original in src
- fix individual packages (steal from Fink, MacPorts, etc.)
- some gcc4 fixes left to be made
- we need to provide Mac OS X disk images of pkgsrc
- we should investigate providing binary packages in native OS X format
- we need a native Mac OS X GUI pkgsrc browser
- native Mac OS X apps: what to do about them?