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DarwinPorts rocks

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28 Mar 2006

As part of my ongoing research relative to Tagyu I’m playing around with various term extraction tools. I tried compiling one of them from source on my Powerbook and got nothing but errors. I prepared to dig into a long battle with missing dependancies, incompatible compiler versions, and other such problems, but just before I jumped in, I decided to check DarwinPorts to see if a version was there.

Yup, there’s a version on DarwinPorts, so on to install it. The first attempt failed, with errors about the gcc compiler. Grrr. But, wait! I’m not using the latest version of DarwinPorts, so port selfupdate and a few moments later, the latest version is installed. Now I try and install the extraction tool and it just works. Dependancies are resolved and installed or upgraded. the extraction tool is installed. And everything works.

For those that have used RedHat’s RPM, you probably don’t have a high opinion of package managers. Debian’s apt is better, but the process has never been so smooth as it is with DarwinPorts.

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