Hello Fink, Goodbye DarwinPorts
I’ve been using DarwinPorts on the Powerbook, but recently I have not been happy with it. Too many of the ports are broken or no longer maintained. I even submitted a nice patch to the php port to the project over two months ago, but nothing has been done. After dealing with this, and seeing some of the headaches that upgrading DarwinPorts has caused at work, I think it is time to go back to Fink.
Fink is a package system for Mac OS X that uses the Debian apt/dpkg/dselect package management tools to provide a lot of open source software to Apple users. I used Fink on my iBook, and the only real complaint that I had was that the binary distribution was always out of date. For example, “stable” Fink only provides binaries for Subversion 1.0.6, even though the much-improved 1.1.x branch has been out for quite some time. This is somewhat annoying to a developer, because we usually need the latest versions of, well, everything. 
So I just spent the evening installing the “unstable” source Fink distribution, and although it took a while to compile everything, it all went very smoothly. That wasn’t really much of a surprise, but it was a nice change from what I have been dealing with using DarwinPorts.
After 7 years of exclusively using Linux on my desktop, I haven’t had a Linux desktop in over two months now, and to my surprise I have started to miss something about it, I just don’t know what. I certainly do not miss having Sid break KDE and X11 after every other upgrade, but I think I miss having complete control over the software on my system. With most software for Mac OS X you are stuck with whatever somebody else has packaged, and however they have packaged it ( I always dread seeing something go in /opt ). That’s the nice thing about Fink unstable; it’s the best part of open source software (latest greatest, often updated), without having to worry about the stability of your system. And you can have it you’re way, just like Burger King promised.