> If you looked at something like MacPorts or Fink, you would see that installing $randomPackage is as simple as "sudo (fink/port) install packagename"

We both know the amount of packages available in Fink pales in comparison to the average Linux distribution. To state otherwise is disingenuous.

I wouldn't say it pales. OK, this is kind of like comparing apples and oranges, but still:

Leopard:

    port list | wc -l
    5038

Tiger:

    fink list | wc -l
    8111

Ubuntu 8.04:

    apt-cache pkgnames | wc -l
    33720

So the number of packages is 5-6x smaller, but most common/useful packages are present. Also you should take into account that many packages present in ubuntu don't mean anything in OS X. And for example there are for example tons of python packages in Ubuntu, all/most of which can be easily installed through easy_install :-)

Let's compare how up to date the packages are:

    port info cmake
    cmake 2.6.1, devel/cmake (Variants: universal)
    ...

    apt-cache show cmake
    ...
    Version: 2.4.7-1build1
    ...

So based on sample of 1 package we can see that MacPorts is more up to date than Ubuntu. Joking aside, cmake really matters to me...

Not to mention that both Fink and (to a lesser extent, lately) MacPorts tend to crap out on every fourth or fifth package you ask them to install...

These package managers are a far cry from a decent Linux, dependencies are handled poorly, installing an innocent looking library sometimes takes hours. If you do a search you will find a lot of painful stories or long pages with tons of magic to install a simple piece of code. Duh.

If you like, you can use Portage from Gentoo on OS X. It's not up to date for Leopard (which is why I didn't mention it before), but the option is there: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bootstrap-ma... - Though it requires slightly more then basic knowledge of a Bash (or $insertYourPreferredShell) to set up. There's also way's to use rpm5's on OS X - And there's patches to get dpkg working on OS X if you fancy apt.

But, again: Mac OS X is not Linux. Setting Portage up is a huge hack to hold things together though. So if you have the time to set a .deb or .rpm-based system up, you should really just get a Linux box to use instead and then take the time you saved and do something productive. At least thats what my experience tells me.

KhmGENTOOkhm