.dmg installer for OSX?

[Heywood Floyd]

On 12/11/11 22:29 , Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> That would be an OSX .dmg. Is a member of the community interested in
> taking up such a project?


I must take this opportunity and proclaim that a MacPorts package would 
be even more fantastic, to the point of giggleingly exciting even!


Rant follows:

Many unix/web developers use MacPorts. Most other open source software, 
big and small, is there, like GCC, LLVM, Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, PHP, 
Perl, Python, Ocaml, Mono, Haskell, Scala, Go, Groovy, Erlang, Eiffel, 
Clojure, Boo, F#, SDL, Valgrind, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Darcs, 
Monotone, SCons, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB etc. etc. 
etc. You can find the full list of packages here: 
http://www.macports.org/ports.php (Over 13000!)

MacPorts is a CLI tool. Installation of packages is dead-simple:

 > port install dmd

Packages are then downloaded and built locally. MacPorts is great 
because it allows users to conveniently stay up to date and rollback to 
older versions easily should something go wrong. Like:

 > port sync
 > port outdated
	dmd		2.056 < 2.057
 > port upgrade dmd
...
 > dmd -run solveWorldProblems
...
... equality.d (7892) : Error: const can not be int when T is 57 and 
delegate has no inout Type!(57) void * [] pure, did you mean "huh"?
...
... "oh noes! bug! argh!!"
...
 > port deactivate dmd @2.057
 > port activate dmd @2.056

I'm sure all can see how wonderful this would be, given DMD's lack of 
stable/testing branches. Oops, did I type that out loud? :)

By default MacPorts installs everything in the /opt/local-folder which 
in my view is awesome. It means the standard system stays pristine and I 
don't feel scared about installing new versions of OSX and stuff like 
that, and should something act weird I can always just zap the 
/opt-folder altogether and have my computer back to (near) 
out-of-the-box condition.

Given that DMD is first and foremost a command-line tool, at least 
certainly when you install it by itself, I must admit I find it almost 
odd no MacPorts package has been made yet. DMG-files and PKG-files are 
fine, but for software that works on the system-level they are just 
blunt. They lack proper dependency meta-data and above all what they do 
can't be undone.

I have no idea how to make a MacPorts package or what it takes to get 
one approved though. Sorry.

MacPorts is of course the Darwin port of the famous FreeBSD port thing, 
only 10-times better than FreeBSD's chaotic fiftyseven "official" 
non-cooperating package managers, imho.

http://macports.org

My 57 cents
/HF