macports vs fink [closed]

Solution 1:

I used Fink for quite a while. One day, I tried out MacPorts, and never switched back to fink.

I found (subjectively) that the packages in MacPorts were kept more up to date, and had fewer tendencies on install to get into mutual-dependency loops of death. Fink packages would often just simply not install, or have versioning/testing issues that I had to go in and fix myself from the source. My MacPorts repository of software is also more compact for some reason; it's about half the disk space of the similarly-equipped fink tree I used to maintain.

MacPorts is a source-based distribution mechanism much like FreeBSD's ports, so it offers you the chance to just let it handle everything for you if you really don't care which compiler flags you pass to the cowsay utility, but do want more fine-grained control over what goes into apache, mysql, etc. I think it's a good compromise between typing ./configure make make install ten thousand times and giving up your system to the whims of a bunch of unknown package maintainers.

Solution 2:

Macports is definitely a more up to date project. I've been using it since it was named Darwinports, and always suited me best (I'm a programmer).

Solution 3:

Neither. Use the source, Luke. If you need quite a bit of Unix software so compiling from source becomes a chore, then look into pkgsrc (The NetBSD Packages Collection), MirPorts (The MirOS Ports Framework) and the likes.