On Oct 19, 2007, at 2:51 AM, Chris Devers wrote:
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Oct 18, 2007, at 11:40 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
Back to the point, this is what I'm confused about. If what you
want is,
pretty narrowly described, Debian's distribution system, then why are
you looking elsewhere? Are you saying Apple should adopt it wholesale?
Yes, I think I am.
I can't picture Debian taking the effort to port what they're doing
to a
new platform,
Ubuntu, Mempis, Knoppix, debian platforms abound. The debian
packaging systems lends itself to building new platforms.
and expectially not a proprietary one, so it would have to
be a case of Apple either backporting Debian's patches packages, or
duplicating the effort with the same intent but from scratch. I'm not
sure I can picture either of these things happening.
I can draw a picture for you: http://finkproject.org/
Within a stable release of the OS (10.3.x, 10.4.x, 10.5.x, etc),
there's
only security updates -- which, iirc, is exactly what Debian does.
Yes, except that security fixes are available through apt-get
immediately. So you update with a 'pull' instead of waiting for a
'push.'
When transitioning between major releases (10.3 - 10.4, 10.4 -
10.5),
things are updatedto the currently available stable version -- which,
iirc, is also exactly what Debian does.
How is this so different?
As for community software, you've got me there. I can't think of any
examples at all of Apple offering things to the community. Aside from
Webkit.
WebKit is a winner.
And launchd.
Does anyone other than Apple even use this?
Oh and Bonjour. Oh and CUPS,
Yes Apple maintains this now, and that is pretty cool, you're right.
But it came from somewhere else.
if you're in to that
whole printing thing on your Debian machines.
I try to avoid it. :-)
Oh and well I guess
Darwin the mach kernel also count.
Such popular software that people are staying away from it in droves.
Oh and I think some patches back to
the GCC suite, last I checked.
So that other free software can run 30% slower on the same chip
architecture.
But aside from those examples, you're
right, there's absolutely no community software available from Apple,
and certainly there doesn't seem to be any on CPAN.
I want 5.10 to work without hassle on OS X (Leopard).
Maybe we need to define hassle, but the concensus from everyone else
seems to be that installing your own copy is unlikely to be difficult,
once it comes out. Remember: a lot of the core Perl developers are Mac
users, so they'll already have been testing it there during
development
rather than just porting to it post-release.
I have already conceded to those more knowledgeable than I, and that
includes nearly everyone on this list, that I am wrong here. I, as a
developer, should maintain the latest version of perl on my machines.
I give in!
I want my code to be run cross platform (I am talking CGI here -
still
there are big differences between LAMP and {M,A}AMP)
Care to elaborate?
Yes I really ought to, but I have little concrete info to provide at
the moment. I am struggling with a bug that appears on OS X with
apache 1.3.33 but not on linux with apache 2.0. I am not sure where
the bug is. It is quite uncharitable of me to cast aspersions on
Apple for this bug, since it is probably my own lousy code, but hey,
I own Apple shares so I feel I have a right to criticize.
Most generic CGI scripts will run with only minor
modification on most versions of Perl, including Windows.
Indeed, and that is one of the things that makes perl so remarkable,
it is amazingly cross platform.
If you want the same code to run verbatim on a bunch of different
platforms, I think the general wisdom is that you're going to have to
target a common denominator, which will mean both [a] a version of the
software that is available on the shipping versions of everything you
target, and [b] a subset of the language functionality that has been
proven to work on all the target platforms you're thinking of.
If you go against either of those assumptions, then of course
things are
not going to be as smooth as you're hoping for.
Thank you, good advice which I will try to follow.
I want the time and effort I invested in learning perl to be useful
for developing native applications on Mac OS X. (I am willing to
learn
how to use CamelBones to accomplish this. Right now I think it best I
learn Objective-C.)
Native contradicts cross-platform, but whatever. As Sherm said,
you'll be able to do this, but it's not going to be bundled (and
therefore you may have a harder time packaging anything written
this way
for general release distribution on Leopard, unless you also bundle
up a
copy of Camelbones et al).
Keep in mind that Ruby Python will also work for this, and
blasphemy
they're both pretty good languages, too /blasphemy.
I have not said anything
