On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Ralph Johnson wrote:

> Someone should get Squeak into Fink.  That would lead to a lot more
> people trying it.

Point well taken.  I will look into it.

Although I still can't help wondering by what metric installing Fink and
then compiling from a source package is in any sense easier than
downloading a ready-to-go binary archive (or even the source archive,
which builds on vanilla OSX without any need for 'special environmental
support').

OTOH, Fink installs itself into /sw so I can hopefully just leave it out
of my PATH and be blissfully unaware of its existence most of the time. :)

ObPhilosphicalSoundingBoard: I really wanted to avoid installing Fink (or
gnu/darwin or anything else of that ilk) on my OSX machine.  All of them
add unreasonable clutter and introduce possibilities for unexpected
dependencies (viz the libiconv thing I just fell over, but _worse_).  An
entirely satisfactory Unix/X11 development environment under OSX is not
hard to build, without relying on any of the nonsense that Fink (or
similar) wants to install just to reach a point where a trivial source
package can be built.  I've successfully compiled lots of Unix/X11
applications from source (including Emacs and even 713Mb of XF86 4.2.1
distrib) on my OSX machine without needing any special Finkian-type stuff
at all.  IMO, if any given Unix app has trouble compiling under OSX then
the solution is to fix the app (rather than trying to 'fix' any perceived
'deficiencies' in the environment under which it's being compiled).  OSX +
optional BSD subsystem + developer tools = a Unix development environment
that is every bit as mature and complete as any other Unix system, albeit
slightly idosyncractic compared to what many people were previously
familiar with.

Ian