David R. Morrison wrote:
On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:09 PM, Max Horn wrote:
Yo folks,
in the following I'd like to tell you a little story that happened to
me today... it is, unfortunately, kind of a sad story, but I hope we
can turn it into one with a happy ending eventually :-)
[snip]
Hi Max.
I've been aware for some time that we had some problems along these
lines. Although we pay lip service to the idea that fink could be used
without having the developer tools installed (and relying only on
binary packages), in practice -- as you point out -- none of the fink
developers do this themselves and so it doesn't get tested very often.
Looking into this is, unfortunately, rather far down on my own list of
priorities for fink-y things to work on. I'm hoping that your story
will motivate someone to step forward who wants to work on this aspect
of fink.
I remember having told a similar story here at least a year ago :-(
It is of course rather embarrassing when you just told someone it takes
5 minutes to install Fink plus Octave and then after two hours you are
still working on it..
In short: Fink works (and always has) on the basis that as soon as you
use "fink install" or "fink selfupdate" (which may involve an "install"
automatically and it may need not only to install a new version of the
fink package, but also to build new versions of apt, dpkg, gettext
etc)), you need the developer tools. Installing the "make" package is
almost useless, the missing "make" command is just the first indication
that the developer tools are needed. The FAQ says this actually rather
early and clearly in section 6.
If you only use apt-get, you don't need the dev tools. The new
--use-binary-dist flag in fink rather muddies the waters here, because
it seems to promise that you can use the binary dist with the "fink"
command which is only partly true.
In FinkCommander things are more clearcut: If you stay with the "binary"
stuff, you can get away without developer tools (with some exceptions
like scilab which actually uses "make" in its postinstall phase), if you
do anything involving "source", you need them.
We should probably state somewhere more prominently that if you want to
work with Fink, you need a "complete installation" of MacOSX, and this
involves
- the BSD tools and X11 from the system installation
- the Xcode developer tools
I don't think there is any serious excuse nowadays (except lack of
information) for not installing all this. It takes 10 minutes and 2GB of
disk space.
--
Martin
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