MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <cremes.devlist at mac.com>
To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
Cc: "Lonnie Cumberland" <lonnie at outstep.com>; "Garrett Cooper"
<youshi10 at u.washington.edu>; <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 6:02 AM
Subject: Re: MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD?


> Ted, you got a couple of things wrong. Read below for the corrections.
>
>
> > The biggest problem with MacOS X is that a lot of UNIX software that
> > runs on FreeBSD and such, is not ported to MacOSX, and it's very
> > difficult to compile on MacOSX.
>
> This is completely wrong. Take a look at macports [1] (formerly
> darwinports) for a large repository of UNIX software that compiles
> very cleanly on OSX. It's nearly 7 years since OSX shipped to the
> public. In that time, most opensource software was updated to compile
> cleanly on OSX. The primary changes to allow this were to the
> "configure" scripts so they recognize darwin as a base OS. If other
> patches were necessary, most software maintainers accepted these
> patches back into their trunk.
>

I spent a lot of time trying to build KDE on Panther and end up at a
dead end.  There's many problems there.  A lot
I understand were fixed in Tiger and there's somewhat of alpha
binaries out there - but they must use magic to build them.  In
any case, Tiger won't run on anything that doesen't have firewire
so you can just toss out your older iMacs right there.

Command line programs do compile, but you have to make
many changes in some of them.  Macports is fine if the program you want is
in there.  If not and your rolling it yourself, then you better know
what your doing.

> OSX has excellent support for most UNIX software.
>

Uh, huh.  Yeah, right.

There's not a lot of UNIX software out there that supports all
the major flavors of UNIX very well, which is why the FreeBSD ports
system is so important for FreeBSD.  And unfortunately more and more
UNIX software is being written and built on Linux and not tested
on FreeBSD.  Take mysql for example, it's heavily dependent on
threads and while the FreeBSD threads implementation is superior
to the Linux implementation, mysql didn't work at all with it until
recently, and it doesen't work as well as under Linux.

Patching the holy hell out of a package to get it to build does
NOT mean there's "excellent support" for the package under
that UNIX.  The package may run fine, in fact, may run better
than under Linux or whatever it was developed on, but that does
not equal support.

Ted