fink / web

TEMPORARY AND INCOMPLETE conversion of Fink web CVS module

Fink ReadMe

This is Fink, a package management system that aims to bring the full world of Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X.

With the help of dpkg, it maintains a separate directory hierarchy. It downloads original source releases, patches them if necessary, configures them for Darwin and compiles and installs them. The information about available packages and the necessary patches (the "package descriptions") are maintained separately, but are usually included with this distribution. The actual source code is downloaded from the Internet as necessary.

Although Fink cannot be considered "mature" and it has some rough edges and lacking features, it is successfully used by a large number of people. Please read the instructions carefully and don't be surprised if something doesn't work as expected. There are good explanations for most failures; check the website if you need help.

Fink is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See the file COPYING for details.

Requirements

You need:

• An installed Mac OS X system, version 10.9 or later. Earlier versions will not work with fink-0.39.2

• The Xcode Command Line Tools are mandatory. This package can be installed either by downloading it directly via developer.apple.com, or by running the xcode-select --install command and choosing the Install button in the window that pops up. You may also need to use this command to update the tools, especially if you're having build problems.

  If you're doing a manual download, make sure that the tools you install match your Mac OS X version.

  Some packages require the full Xcode.

• Java. Entering javac from a Terminal.app window should suffice to make the system download it for you, (10.7, 10.9) or open up a browser window from which you can downloadthe latest Java JDK (10.8).

• Many other things that come with Mac OS X and the Developer Tools. This includes perl and curl.

• Internet access. All source code is downloaded from mirror sites.

• Patience. Compiling several big packages takes time. I'm talking hours or even days here.

Installation

The installation process is described in detail in the file INSTALL. Please read it first, the process is non-trivial. It also describes the upgrade procedure.

Using Fink

The file USAGE describes how to set your paths and how to install and remove packages. It also has a complete list of available commands.

Further Questions?

If the documentation included here doesn't answer your question, stroll over to the Fink website at https://www.finkproject.org/ and check out the Help page there: https://www.finkproject.org/help/. It will point you at the other documentation that is available and sources for support if you need it.

If you'd like to contribute to Fink, the Help page mentioned above also has a list of things you can do, like testing or creating packages.

Staying Informed

The project's website is at https://www.finkproject.org/.

To be informed of new releases, go to https://www.finkproject.org/lists/fink-announce.php and subscribe to the fink-announce mailing list. The list is moderated and low-traffic.

web's Issues

Import the Fink web CVS module into git, switch to that

The code for our website (and manual) is currently still stored in the web CVS module (resp. the virtual CVS modules xml and website, the former of which consists of the web/xml subdir, the latter is web minus web/xml).

Importing the code with its history (with fixed committer names, etc.) to git will be only the first step for that. We also need to adapt the code to work with git.

The primary obstacle I am aware of is that the XML files and surrounding scripts heavily rely on CVS tags like $Author$ and $Date$ in order to generate info about who last changed each page, and when.

One way to go about that is to simply remove the use of those tags from the XML files. Then, in the first iteration, just treat them as blank (we loose some nice information on the website, but at least we can switch to git). Better (and the long-term goal) will be to add a preprocess script which, given the XML file, uses git to retrieve the required information about each XML file, and then passes the data on to the XML preprocessor (resp. generates a temporary XML files with the correct data inserted -- but these are implementation details anyway).

Other than that (and some reordering of the file structure), we should be good.

Add explicit hyperlinks on installation page

Our primary installation instructions right now are on http://finkproject.org/doc/bundled/install-fast.php resp. http://finkproject.org/doc/bundled/install-first.php

We mention connect.apple.com several times there, shouldn't we turn this into hyperlinks? More importantly, though, it tells the user to
Start out by copying the fink-0.35.1.tar.gz file to your home folder [...]

But as far as I can tell, there are no instructions on how to obtain this. I think we really should provide a hyperlink to it. Or perhaps even add a suitable wget / curl invocation for downloading it. Something like:

If you have not yet done so, download fink-0.35.1.tar.gz, for example via a webbrowser. Alternatively, you can download it directly in the terminal by entering the following command ... insert suitable curl invocation ...

Delete 'web' repo because it is outdated

This copy of the old CVS module is outdated. The real copy that's being updated is called "website".