Darwin Ports - The Review

On May 9th, I removed fink in favor of Darwin Ports. I have to say that the switch was pretty well painless, and considerably better. I am more use to this style of ports layout, coming from my Free/OpenBSD background.

The GUI tools, although fairly new are very easy to use, so I would recommend them to even a novice user who is fed up with fink, just as I was. A lot of how well it works comes from one man alone, Jordan Hubbard! He leads the development for Apple on Darwin, and created Darwin Ports as a way for people to install unix software in Darwin more easily.

All software by default installs into /opt/local, which technically installed software should go, why fink ever thought /sw/bin was a good place is beyond me.

I do have one complaint, its regarding the GUI tool; The GUI tool or even the command line tool for that matter has no way to view installed packages. I could be missing something, but I can't find the option to allow me to see this.

Anyways, I'll be sticking with Darwin Ports from now on, and on any OSX machine I build, I'll install it as well.