Dan Colish

All work and no play

I began configuring my systems for development by using the available binaries that were pre-compiled and posted to their respective sites. These worked great for the most part since I was new to dynamic languages. I really felt that I was super advanced for not using a packaged development app such as MAMP, XAMPP or Locomotive (which are great, don’t get me wrong). The problem was this; updating prepackaged binaries sucked. I had to basically uninstall everything and re-install. Combine that with how little I was actually learning by just using what was given, I really started to hate that and went back to MAMP and Locomotive for a while.Finally, I read an article by Dan Benjamin who writes Hivelogic. His tutorial was excellent in taking me through the steps to build and configure a RoR stack for my system; much thanks! So now I was set to go with a new custom install and I used Gems to manage my ruby extension packages. I was also spending an enormous amount of time compiling Apache, PHP, and MYSQL servers on various systems. In comparison, Gems was a godsend! I decided to go forward with finding a package manager that would function as well for all my software so I could stop the insanity of continuously compiling software from scratch.

MacPorts vs Fink

I pulled both sources off the web and installed them. Here’s the thing although, I am running Leopard, now at 10.5.1. Fink’s Leopard distro was still in beta, MacPorts was not. I tried Fink first because I hear a lot of good things about it. So I pulled the source and built it. Fink loaded ok, but I ran into many issues with configuring newly installed software. I believed Fink may be a more powerful, albeit more complex, manager. I grew frustrated and took a break. MacPorts had also just released its Leopard distro. Again, I pulled the source and built it. I ran the selfupdate and I was off. At this point I had to reconfigure my shell and a few other daemons so that my new Macports installs of Apache2 Php5 and MYSQL would run instead of the built in versions. That was pretty straight forward and I was done. Now all my installs were managed by Macports and will be from now on.

The Bottom Line

If you’re doing a lot of system building, interested in UNIX/Open Source Applications, or you just like a bit more power out of your computer, ditch the super-easy road and learn how to use the command line for effective software instillation and configuration. If you couldn’t be bothered then don’t, use MAMP or Locomotive and don’t shocked when some advanced features don’t work. I’m planning to follow up with instructions for doing all of the actions I described in this editorial. I will try not to duplicate current information on the web. If you can’t wait, try a google search. That’s how I learned.

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