6.6. Mac OS X Package Management

There are two freely available package management systems for Mac OS X.

6.6.1. Fink and Fink Commander

The Fink project 's goal is to port important Open Source and Free Software to Darwin and Mac OS X. To that end, the project provides the Fink package management system, which makes it easy to install, upgrade, and uninstall Open Source software.

Fink is based on the Debian tools dpkg, dselect, and apt-get (described earlier in this chapter). It uses these tools to manage downloading, building, and installation of available packages. The current default location for installation is the /sw directory; this name does not conflict with any of the other standard Unix or Mac OS X installation directories, which keeps package management simple.

The Fink project is based at http://fink.sourceforge.net. From there you can download the fink command-line program and other tools and start downloading the packages that are available.

Fink Commander provides an Aqua-based GUI interface to Fink. The web starting point is http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net. A binary version of Fink Commander is included when you download Fink, so you don't have to build Fink Commander yourself.

For more information, including screenshots of Fink Commander, see the two web sites just cited.

6.6.2. The GNU Mac OS X Public Archive

The GNU Mac OS X Public Archive (OSXGNU) at http://www.osxgnu.org provides an alternative to Fink. It provides a package management system that extends the rudimentary facilities already available in Mac OS X (i.e., the standard Mac OS X installer facilities).

The advantage to the OSXGNU project is that you don't have to use a terminal to install packages; you just launch them. The OSXGNU project provides the OS X Package Manager , which is an Aqua-based GUI interface to the Mac OS X package management system. It lets you manage all the packages installed on your system, not just those downloaded from the OSXGNU site.

A disadvantage to the OSXGNU system is that it doesn't track different versions of packages or automatically download new software for you. You have to do that yourself manually, whereas Fink's Debian-based tools are considerably more Internet-aware.

6.6.3. Building from Source

Of course, you can always build software from source code as well. Open a Terminal window and download whatever package you wish to build using a program such as curl or ftp. Be sure you have the development tools installed, and then follow the standard recipe as presented in Chapter 1.