What next?

Mike Hearn mike at navi.cx
Thu Jun 2 06:10:54 UTC 2005


On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 19:28:22 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Yep its always fun having 23 different versions of gtk installed, one
> for each gtk based app you want to run.  All with a different patch
> level... with no clear way to update any of them.

Word on the street is that it's traditional for operating systems to ship
with a widget toolkit and lots of other things too. Mac apps usually have
few (if any) dependencies because they depend on the OS itself. By saying
"This app requires MacOS X 10.3 or higher" apps get a massive chunk of
functionality for free, that would on Linux require about 70 dependencies
in order to express.

> a lack of update notification.  Oh yeah.. thats absolutely wonderful.

That's why Gaim has an auto-update plugin that will pop up a message when
there is an update.

In fact, given that the little Fedora/Red Hat tray thing has *never*
actually been able to stick in my session for more than about a week, I'm
not sure why you think Fedora has user-friendly auto update either.
Remembering to run a magic command every few weeks isn't user friendly.

>> - Nearly every app is packaged in this way. Mac users never have to
>>   compile from source or wait while an app [update] is packaged.
> 
> So no one uses fink anymore to get applications?  I guess i should go
> tell them to close the project down.

No, Apples target audience are not UNIX heads using lots of trivially
"ported" software so nobody in their target audience uses fink. Apps that
are actually designed and built for the Mac as opposed to simply being
compilable on it never have to be compiled from the source. Ever. 

thanks -mike




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