[Sven G]

[daSilVetZ]

installing it now... i'm excited

[daSilVetZ]

http://www.benchmarksims.com/ub/panthertaming.jpg

[[APi]TheMan]

I think I'm confused. All this talk about package management... fink, darwin ports, portage? So now we have three package management systems on OS X? I don't understand what good having three of these package management systems is. Fink has, what, 2500 packages? Darwinports has probably half that many? What will portage do? Here begins my confusion:

"Right now it's a tool to install lots of commonly requested applications on OS X", explains Pieter van den Abeele. "But in a few months, we'll have a port system that builds Darwin from scratch, provides a standardised lookup and installation routine for Dashboard widgets, enhancements and tools like the Desktop Manager and many, many more popular OS X applications."

He's talking about Dashboard and Desktop Manager, those aren't Unix applications... are they proposing that we have a system to track OS X applications?

From the gentoo announcement page linked in the first post:

It sets environment variables and demands a bootstrapping shell script to be run before the first emerge that detects the operating system (Panther or Tiger), chooses the relevant profiles and injects every application it finds already installed in MacOS X.

emerge? inject? Are those just gentoo terms?

"Right now it's a tool to install lots of commonly requested applications on OS X", explains Pieter van den Abeele. "But in a few months, we'll have a port system that builds Darwin from scratch, provides a standardised lookup and installation routine for Dashboard widgets, enhancements and tools like the Desktop Manager and many, many more popular OS X applications."

Man, I'm really wishing that I had tried gentoo when I heard how cool it was last year... Maybe I would be more in the know if I had played with Gentoo to see why it's so different.

[wataru]

This looks interesting. I want to know more about "injecting," though. Does it modify pre-existing apps?

[Sven G]

Sofar, this Gentoo Mac OS thing just seems to be Yet Another Package Manager (to say it in SuSE-like language), or something similar: we'll see what happens in the future (see also their own statements), as always. Personally, I think that Fink will be the way to go for Unix software on OS X, at least until DarwinPorts, Gentoo and Apple's own Installer become more mature and powerful: for example, it would be cool if Tiger included a new Apple Installer, maybe based on the Metapkg.org people's efforts - unlikely, but who knows...?

As for the emerge and inject things, AFAIK there's a comprehensive FAQ on the Gentoo web site...

[utidjian]

Originally posted by wataru:
This looks interesting. I want to know more about "injecting," though. Does it modify pre-existing apps?

The words emerge and inject are gentoo-isms. This might explain it a bit: http://re.a.la/man/emerge/

inject is really an option for the emerge command. In the context of the article you site it means that it will scan your existing software installation and "inject" the resulting list into some sort of database. That is why it is run before anything else in the Gentoo:Mac OS X setup.... so that the Gentoo:Mac OS X becomes aware of all the pre-existing Mac OS X apps. It does nothing evil to your exising Mac OS X installation.

I too was confused about the idea Gentoo Mac OS X... what about Fink, et. al? But after reading the article it appears that it is a combined effort to integrate Fink style package management (Debian GNU/Linux dpkg based) with Gentoo style package management (Gentoo Linux portage based) and Darwinports package management (BSD ports based) into one "metapackage" management thingy. Seems to me that for Mac OS X it is a pretty cool idea. While the Apple supplied Installer.app is OK and easy enough to use.... it only manages the apps that were installed using it. Installer.app is a great installer (hence the name) but completely lacks many of the features of a full package management system. As the headline says "... we have a problem..." and comprehensive package management system will help solve a lot of those problems. I really like the idea of the iSync integration... install an app in one machine and sync it to all the Macs on my LAN. Should make the job of managing the software on a couple of hundred Macs a LOT easier.

It will be interesting to see how well the whole thing works.

[jguidroz]

Originally posted by daSilVetZ:
http://www.benchmarksims.com/ub/panthertaming.jpg

What app is running on the left side of your screen?

Juice

[Earth Mk. II]

portage on OS X?

emerge darwin?

wtf? These gentoo folk are insane - and not in the good way. I can see a million kids who think they're pretty "l33t" pestering developers to support their custom configured darwin kernels compiled with weird-ass compiler flags that ultimately make the whole system terribly unusable.

Package management and adding utilities not provided by default is one thing (and a good thing™) - but this is excessive, and ultimately a bad thing. We don't need to be able to recompile the entire base system.

Originally posted by daSilVetZ:
http://www.benchmarksims.com/ub/panthertaming.jpg

GRR! that's way too wide... READ!

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by Earth Mk. II:
GRR! that's way too wide... READ!

Hah, yeah, and Firefox won't even expand its window large enough to encapsulate all of the text...

Originally posted by utidjian:
I too was confused about the idea Gentoo Mac OS X... what about Fink, et. al? But after reading the article it appears that it is a combined effort to integrate Fink style package management (Debian GNU/Linux dpkg based) with Gentoo style package management (Gentoo Linux portage based) and Darwinports package management (BSD ports based) into one "metapackage" management thingy. Seems to me that for Mac OS X it is a pretty cool idea. While the Apple supplied Installer.app is OK and easy enough to use.... it only manages the apps that were installed using it. Installer.app is a great installer (hence the name) but completely lacks many of the features of a full package management system. As the headline says "... we have a problem..." and comprehensive package management system will help solve a lot of those problems.

It will be interesting to see how well the whole thing works.

Ah, I'm glad I'm not the only one. I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense, I guess I just never related Installer.app to the whole package management paradigm because all it does is... install. It does seem like with a little work that someone could throw a little interface together for manipulating installer receipts (see DesInstaller for removing packages).

Package management is awesome, though I feel bad because it's too easy sometimes; fink definitely brings Unix to the masses, it definitely makes installing and managing packages very easy. In Mac OS 9 install ing and removing programs was as easy as dragging the application to the trash and throwing a few extensions away. In OS X it gets a little more complicated, especially when applications have installers requiring administrator access to plop files all over the /System and /Library. I suppose that, while we have fink and darwin ports (and now portage), there is something to be said about the possibilities of Metapkg. If it could be executed well then it would be killer... I am excited to see what these guys can do.

Gentoo failed relatively early during the emerge system part on my Panther box... oh well.

[daSilVetZ]

Originally posted by jguidroz:
What app is running on the left side of your screen?

Juice

XRG Resource Graph

Originally posted by Earth Mk. II:
GRR! that's way too wide... READ!

It is not too wide, as it is not "inline", but rather a link to an external pic.. those rules apply only to imbedded images.

[Gary Kerbaugh]

   There is precious little documentation on this at the moment but what I saw suggested that Gentoo will install files in their "classic" locations in system directories. This means that they will blow away the original Apple files and irrevocably change your system. Fink and DarwinPorts install virtually everything in special directories created to hold the installations. Thus, if you're unhappy with something that Fink or DarwinPorts installs, you have but to remove it. That doesn't appear to be the case with Gentoo. It looks like to me that the only way to uninstall Gentoo is to reinstall the entire operating system.

   Also, if Gentoo alters the system, there is the possibility that applications whose developers have already ported them to MacOS X would no longer compile "out of the box".

   I will never install a package manager that "futzes" with my system.

[utidjian]

Originally posted by Gary Kerbaugh:
   There is precious little documentation on this at the moment but what I saw suggested that Gentoo will install files in their "classic" locations in system directories. This means that they will blow away the original Apple files and irrevocably change your system. Fink and DarwinPorts install virtually everything in special directories created to hold the installations. Thus, if you're unhappy with something that Fink or DarwinPorts installs, you have but to remove it. That doesn't appear to be the case with Gentoo. It looks like to me that the only way to uninstall Gentoo is to reinstall the entire operating system.

   Also, if Gentoo alters the system, there is the possibility that applications whose developers have already ported them to MacOS X would no longer compile "out of the box".

   I will never install a package manager that "futzes" with my system.

I agree... after reading this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_MacOS
So unless one has a sacrificial system to try it out on it could be risky. At least they give fair warning... though they should also put that warning all over the place (including the main link page: http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20...newsletter.xml and http://www.metadistribution.org/macos/ )

There is some discussion on how Gentoo is to integrate with Mac OS X here: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos-1.xml which sheds a bit more light on the problem. It seems that the current idea is to install gentoo in /opt/gentoo which is in perfect keeping with the FHS... more so than Fink's /sw. The proposal outlines some of the difficulties in grafting any package management system (PMS) on top of an existing non-PMS type system such as Mac OS X. Currently there are problems with ANY package management system including the Mac OS X Installer.app. If a vendor creates a "poorly made package" it can overwrite files on the existing system that it shouldn't. Apples idea of using software "bundles" is a partial solution to guard against this sort of problem by keeping all files from a given app entirely within the "bundle" (/Applications/Safari.app/ for example). BUT with a poorly made package there is nothing to stop the Installer.app from installing files in locations other than within the "bundle" location. There is nothing to stop the package from altering the filesystem in some way that breaks the systems functionality. That is why we have Repair Permissions and have to use it more or less often. I think that there are some safeguards (Anyone know for sure?) built in to the X-Code devel tools for checking package consistency. They can also be overridden.

I have had limited experience with portage on Gentoo. I installed Gentoo Linux once about a year ago. It was a very complicated setup and there was a lot for me to learn (still is). It also took about a week to get a system fully installed with all the stuff I wanted. For official Gentoo packages there were no problems. The Gentoo developers are very careful and make very good quality packages. If Gentoo gets more popular this may change dramatically as people start to create packages that are not part of the official Gentoo tree.

The only PMS I have seen so far that handles these problems reasonably well is Red Hat's RPM. Users still have lots of complaints about RPM but that is almost exclusively due to poorly made third party RPM packages. The current RPM system as of, at least, Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1 and 2 is to simply not install a poorly made package. RPM will complain (in detail) if a package is not "signed" with the correct GPG key or if it tries to overwrite an existing file or alter an existing configuration or install any "unlisted" files.

As I said before... it will be interesting to see how well Gentoo:Mac OS X thing will work.

[Turias]

Originally posted by utidjian:
I agree... after reading this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_MacOS
So unless one has a sacrificial system to try it out on it could be risky. At least they give fair warning... though they should also put that warning all over the place (including the main link page: http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20...newsletter.xml and http://www.metadistribution.org/macos/ )

While it is risky, it isn't that risky. As you mentioned, it's risky to install any software from any installer as they all write things into the root section of your harddrive and could all theoretically overwrite files. It might be more risky to install something via Portage since they probably don't have as much time to thoroughly QA all the packages they support, but still, I have been using Gentoo for almost a year now and have been quite impressed. The Gentoo forums are an excellent source of information and full of helpful people. If for some reason anything goes wrong, you shouldn't hesitate to post questions there. Most of the time they will be answered quite quickly.

But I'd like to say that this is really geared toward people with a good amount of experience with UNIX. I wouldn't try Portage on OS X out unless you really know your way around the terminal. If you don't, I would wait until they start to perfect the GUI tools they mentioned in the newsletter linked to above, at which point a number of people will have had the time to hammer out the preliminary bugs. In fact, I think the current release is really geared toward people that have experience with both OS X and Gentoo.

Originally posted by utidjian:
I have had limited experience with portage on Gentoo. I installed Gentoo Linux once about a year ago. It was a very complicated setup and there was a lot for me to learn (still is). It also took about a week to get a system fully installed with all the stuff I wanted. For official Gentoo packages there were no problems. The Gentoo developers are very careful and make very good quality packages. If Gentoo gets more popular this may change dramatically as people start to create packages that are not part of the official Gentoo tree.

The only PMS I have seen so far that handles these problems reasonably well is Red Hat's RPM. Users still have lots of complaints about RPM but that is almost exclusively due to poorly made third party RPM packages. The current RPM system as of, at least, Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1 and 2 is to simply not install a poorly made package. RPM will complain (in detail) if a package is not "signed" with the correct GPG key or if it tries to overwrite an existing file or alter an existing configuration or install any "unlisted" files.

While complicated, installing Gentoo Linux is quite straight-forward. The documentation is superb, and other than figuring out how to compile my own kernel, everything was a piece of cake.

You mentioned the idea of people creating their own ebuilds (Portage packages for the uninitiated) once Gentoo becomes more popular. People are already doing this when they want to install new software that hasn't made it into the main tree. For example, someone just recently posted an ebuild for BOINC on the forums. I don't think it will ever become popular for lots of people to distribute lots of different ebuilds for Portage. I think instead that Gentoo encourages people who write these ebuilds to submit them for inclusion in the main tree. Most people do not go out looking for and downloading ebuilds.

I'm surprised that you sing the praises of RPM. Before installing Gentoo, I installed RedHat 9 and was appalled by how horrible that package management system was. When I wanted to install something, I had to scour the internet for rpm files that applied to my version of RedHat. There were three or four main sites I had to search, and occasionally, when they weren't there, I had to go digging through Google. Then, it wouldn't even let me install package x because it depended on packages y and z. So, I would then have to repeat the entire process with those packages, and it took forever.

Really, there should never be a need for 8 different package files for the same version of an application, which is what I see with rpm. With Gentoo, I type `emerge mozilla', and mozilla, along with all of its dependencies are installed for me. No painstaking searches through the internet, no dependency calculations, nothing. It's easy.

So, yeah, I love Portage. It is very powerful and at the same time very easy to use (much easier, I have found, than fink). I'm looking forward to testing this out on my machine when I get a chance.

[jguidroz]

I am a big fan of Gentoo, more so than any other Linux distribution out there. I'm really looking forward to Portage being fully functional on OS X. I'm hoping that some changes are made that will allow installation of programs that are not tar'ed and gzipped (unless I missed something along the way. For some applications like Adium which gets update recently, I'd like to be able to create an ebuild where I could emerge adium and it would download the current release, rename the old application or remove it, mount the disk image, copy the new version over, unmount the image, and be done with. So far, I can't figure out with the current incarnation of portage if this is possible.

[Edit]
Actually, I just found an adium ebuild over at the adium forums, but I'm pretty sure it's for the source, and not binary. While this is cool too, not every program gives source available, so it would also be nice to use Gentoo to install binary apps.

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by jguidroz:
I am a big fan of Gentoo, more so than any other Linux distribution out there. I'm really looking forward to Portage being fully functional on OS X. I'm hoping that some changes are made that will allow installation of programs that are not tar'ed and gzipped (unless I missed something along the way. For some applications like Adium which gets update recently, I'd like to be able to create an ebuild where I could emerge adium and it would download the current release, rename the old application or remove it, mount the disk image, copy the new version over, unmount the image, and be done with. So far, I can't figure out with the current incarnation of portage if this is possible.

[Edit]
Actually, I just found an adium ebuild over at the adium forums, but I'm pretty sure it's for the source, and not binary. While this is cool too, not every program gives source available, so it would also be nice to use Gentoo to install binary apps.

Is 'ebuild' another gentooism?

But honestly, the idea of managing Mac OS X applications like Adium is a very cool idea. I would then love support for open source cocoa apps like Cyberduck, Colloquy, Adium etc...

[utidjian]

Originally posted by Turias:
You mentioned the idea of people creating their own ebuilds (Portage packages for the uninitiated) once Gentoo becomes more popular. People are already doing this when they want to install new software that hasn't made it into the main tree. For example, someone just recently posted an ebuild for BOINC on the forums. I don't think it will ever become popular for lots of people to distribute lots of different ebuilds for Portage. I think instead that Gentoo encourages people who write these ebuilds to submit them for inclusion in the main tree. Most people do not go out looking for and downloading ebuilds.

What about when there are other Gentoo based distros? Will an ebuild for Gentoo:Mac OS X emerge as easily on Gentoo:Linux?

There was a time when Red Hat was the only RPM based distro and there were sites and CDs with "contrib" RPMs from outsiders. Life was simple then... all contribs "just worked". Now with SuSE, Mandrake, and more than a dozen others life isn't so simple. Forking of naming conventions and dependencies has made them much less compatible. Then there are the commercial RPMs. How does Gentoo deal with commercial ebuilds? How would you 'emerge eagle'? http://www.cadsoft.de/

I'm surprised that you sing the praises of RPM. Before installing Gentoo, I installed RedHat 9 and was appalled by how horrible that package management system was. When I wanted to install something, I had to scour the internet for rpm files that applied to my version of RedHat. There were three or four main sites I had to search, and occasionally, when they weren't there, I had to go digging through Google. Then, it wouldn't even let me install package x because it depended on packages y and z. So, I would then have to repeat the entire process with those packages, and it took forever.

Red Hat 9 is old news. But you can still get yum (or apt-get) for versions of Red Hat as far back as 7.3. Using yum it is as simple as 'yum install applicationname'... all dependencies are handled. With Gentoo it is as easy IF AND ONLY IF someone has already created that particular ebuild and submitted it to the tree. If not you are in the same boat as anyone else and will have to create and your own... figuring out the dependencies and so on.

Really, there should never be a need for 8 different package files for the same version of an application, which is what I see with rpm. With Gentoo, I type `emerge mozilla', and mozilla, along with all of its dependencies are installed for me. No painstaking searches through the internet, no dependency calculations, nothing. It's easy.

It IS easy.... for both PMS systems... but only if someone has already created the package for your PMS tree. Granted it was over a year ago but I did have problems with some of the ebuilds in Gentoo... some just wouldn't emerge.

How long did 'emerge mozilla' take to build? What if you have 100 systems that you want to emerge mozilla on to? With RPM/yum this is very very simple. With Gentoo:Mac OS X it also looks like it may be as simple with the proposed iSync functionality.

To do an 'rpmbuild -bb mozilla-latest.src.rpm' can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on the system. Then there is QA time to make sure it works well. Then a minute or two to push the new RPM(s) out to a hundred clients.

I like Gentoo very much but I don't see any particular advantage of portage over RPM/yum and I see quite a few disadvantages. Gentoo is great for an individual highly customized system that only uses software available from the Gentoo tree. For my situation (college computer and physics labs) Gentoo simply does not come with the mix of software that I need nor the tools for managing a lot of workstations and servers software. Mac OS X lacks many of these tools also. I hear that there are some interesting things in Tiger that may make it much simpler to manage a large lab of Macs.

[davecom]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
Is 'ebuild' another gentooism? :P

But honestly, the idea of managing Mac OS X applications like Adium is a very cool idea. I would then love support for open source cocoa apps like Cyberduck, Colloquy, Adium etc...

But why? I can't think of any 'really good' reason for regular users to be using a system that compiles source for them when they could just download a binary.

[Sven G]

Originally posted by davecom:
But why? I can't think of any 'really good' reason for regular users to be using a system that compiles source for them when they could just download a binary.

You're certainly right on this (for the end-user): rather, the point of all these new package managers should mainly be to find some form of synthesis with which to replace or integrate Apple's current Installer.app, which is currently far too limited (it doesn't handle dependencies and uninstalls, first of all) - done this, Fink, DarwinPorts, Gentoo, RPM, OSXPM, etc. could remain as power-user options, even if it would be better to try to integrate them and streamline them as much as possible, IMHO...

[jguidroz]

Originally posted by davecom:
But why? I can't think of any 'really good' reason for regular users to be using a system that compiles source for them when they could just download a binary.

Because Portage can be used to download the binary, move or remove the old binary, mount the image, install the binary, unmount the image, and discard the disk image if you want.

[davecom]

Originally posted by jguidroz:
Because Portage can be used to download the binary, move or remove the old binary, mount the image, install the binary, unmount the image, and discard the disk image if you want.

So can drag and drop... I think we should really be encouraging developers to move away from using installers and to move towards bundling things together so that a 'drag and drop' install is possible. Microsoft Office used to do it(not sure if it still does), and that's just about as complex as desktop software for end users gets.