Fink versus macports

By praveen at Wed, Aug 18 2010 12:29am |

I have been using fink on Leopard for last 3 years and have been happy with it. Now I got a new machine with Snow Leopard and would like to find out if there is any clear advantage between fink and macports. Most of the discussion I have seen on the internet is too old, so I thought I will ask it here, since I am also an academic and do scientific computing.

I am not worried about having the latest versions. More important is robustness. Also less dependancy would be good, so that I dont have to install too many packages. Hope people will weigh in with their experiences.

‹ Grant Writing on a Mac Software for Rman or IR Spectra ›

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Wed, 2010-08-18 00:45 — praveen

From what I have observed

From what I have observed about macports, it seems that it has much larger dependancies than fink. E.g., trying to install asymptote through macports requires too many other packages. Is this correct ?

And how is fink support for Snow Leopard ?

Fri, 2010-08-20 08:36 — pmolfese

I use MacPorts personally.

I use MacPorts personally. I switched over when fink hadn't updated to support leopard right away and MacPorts was there. I think they're fairly comparable. I've found that, depending on the package, one has a newer version of something than the other. This isn't usually a big deal. MacPorts tended to have newer versions of ffmpeg which was handy because I was doing development calling the ffmpeg libraries. At this point, pick one and use it. I've known other devs who have both installed.

Fri, 2010-08-20 21:49 — LeninWTigger

I haven't used macports

I haven't used macports ever. So I can only speak of the benefits that have make me stay with fink.

First of all, large number of scientific tools for proteins structure (ccp4, coot, pymol, etc). Most of the time, up to the date.

Second, familiarity and robustness. I have been using fink since OS X 10.2. In my experience, the only problems I have run in the last few years are either OS X updates (moving from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6) or user related errors.

Third, there is this awesome guy (W. G. Scott) who mantains a "public" server with plenty of precompiled stuff. Check his main fink-related pages.

Fourth, got a 64 bit capable machine? Fink is the way to go. Again, I don't use macports so I don't know if this is also true for them.

As for the support subject, I am running 10.6.4 now without problems. One thing you can run into (I am not calling it a problem but an awareness thing) is that sci apps with their one python interpreter might be incompatible with fink in 64 bits. A work around is to just not load fink when the terminal is launched but instead launch the other app.

Another issue is that some fink X11 apps might work better the open-source Xquartz instead of the Apple provided one. I prefer the open source so I am not current about this issue. Last time I encountered this was in OS 10.5.

My 2 cents.

Fri, 2010-09-03 19:00 — ajcarr

I found that fink broke the

I found that fink broke the standard GnuPG installation. It works fine with macports. Porticus is also a pretty nice free GUI frontend for macports -- considerably nicer the Fink Commander.