Re: Apples / osX

[Paul Day <paulday () toll com au>]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Kelly Martin wrote:
> > s/"some"/"just about all". All my favourite Open-source tools will compile
> > on Mac OS X no problems. If you want a decent packaging environment, fink
> > is based on Debian's dpkg and is great if you want to keep your tools
> > up-to-date.
>
> I have to say that fink seemed odd to me for someone coming from the
> Unix world... it works but I found Darwin Ports to be much more useful,
> they're more like the ports collection on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and for
> security tools they are often more up-to-date. Personal preference.

*nod*

I've spent the last couple of years swapping between the two, sometimes
running both so I can get the latest version of some utility from
which-ever had it. However, since getting back to civilisation after a
long period of travelling and upgrading to 10.4, I've used just Fink
Unstable and always found the latest in there so far.

My main gripe with Darwin Ports is the lack of a "port upgrade" feature.
At least with Fink, even if it is more Linux-like compared to the BSD-ness
of ports, I know I am always running the latest bleeding-egde versions of
every utility - and so far in 10.4 Unstable I'm yet to notice a bug in
said latest bleeding-edge versions.

> Many people like to get all their security tools from a port, but you
> have to wait for the port to be updated to the latest version, and you
> lose a certain amount of control like configure options.

True, some utilities I will compile from source into /usr/local for that
very reason.

> Most tools are probably better compiled on your own. With Apple's
> developer tools (on the OS X disc) you get GCC 4 and all the libraries,
> plus Apple's optimized X-Windows for unix GUI apps. All you're probably
> missing are some dependencies, which you can get easily using darwin
> ports. Darwin feels like normal BSD to me, with a nice OS X desktop or
> just X when you need it. I like to use darwin ports for something like
> gtk+, and then go compile tools like nessus on your own. Saves time but
> keeps you in control.

Yes, and the nessus all-in-one compiler/installer now works for Mac OS X
too, where-as you used to have to compile each nessus package
individually.

However, they did break the nessus-update-plugins/nessus-fetch
download-through-a-proxy feature which means updating your plugins by hand
for those of us on firewalled networks going through an http proxy server.

Cheers,
Paul