On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 05:17 PM, Jerry Yeager pondered: > Fink allows you to find, download and install Unix and Linux software. > (To be useful though you will want to get the Fink Commander GUI to go > along with it. Fink by itself is a command line program that you have > to know the commands to use. Fink commander takes care of that. > > i have used it quite a bit in the past and really liked it, but lately > i am wondering now how much longer it will be useful
There are two programs in the fink project: fink and apt-get. With fink, you actually download source code that's compiled on your machine. With apt-get, you can grab the corresponding programs already compiled. I don't think fink will disappear soon because there's no other comparable package manager for Mac OS X and Darwin. Installing Unix programs without a good package manager is stupidly hard. With a package manager it's really easy. For example, to install a complicated program like Xemacs, all you have to do is open a terminal window (or xterm, Jerry) and type fink xemacs or apt-get install xemacs Without fink, you'd likely be messing with makefiles and other Unixy arcana until the sun goes nova. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be February 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
