I have been running fink on my home machine for years, and I've been running Macports on my work machine for a few months now. I have to run Macports at work because our firewall blocks many of the URLs for fink's source repositories. In my experience so far, fink has been much more elegant and more graceful to use. It is operated by a large group of enthusiasts many of whom happen to be scientists. So, there is a greater emphasis on functionality and good support, especially for scientists. However, Macports seems to provide packages that are perhaps prettier. For example, the Gnome packages on Macports are built with many additional xorg GUI libraries, so they tend to look sharper than those built via fink. (I base this on pan running on both computers.) On the whole, I highly recommend fink over macports. The package managers are more responsive. The packages are made to be robust, and they adhere very strictly to the philosophy that the fink distribution does not interfere AT ALL with the OS X system. So, if you ever want to remove the fink subsystem, you simply execute sudo rm -rf /sw and you're done. Macports does tend to override certain OS X core functions, to my understanding. As of now, I'm having a much easier time building packages on fink than I am on macports on Snow Leopard using the x86_64 tree. KDE is broken on both fink and macports at the moment, but both distributions offer native KDE integration. I'm waiting for KDE 4.3 to be released so that I can run KDE applications inside quartz. (See amarok2-mac in the fink pacakges.) So, the native OS X look is coming to both Gnome and KDE. All of that said, you're much better off using the R binaries distributed by the R-Foundation. First, you are far more likely to get a more recent package (fink tree is still at 2.7.0 http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/r-base ) with R.app included. Fink doesn't include the GUI. The macports distribution of R seems to be up to date, http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/math/R/Portfile but it's hard to tell if it includes the GUI. So, build R yourself only if you have the time and idle processors. :) Payam __________________ Payam Minoofar, Ph.D. Scientist Meissner Filtration Products 4181 Calle Tesoro Camarillo, CA 93012 +1 805 388 9911 ext. 159 +1 805 388 5948 fax payam.minoofar at meissner.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Payam Minoofar.vcf Type: text/directory Size: 28368 bytes Desc: Payam Minoofar.vcf URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/attachments/20091013/7604dd90/attachment-0001.bin> -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00001..txt URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/attachments/20091013/7604dd90/attachment-0001.txt>
package management system: Fink vs MacPorts?
1 message · Payam Minoofar