Installing Fink on OS X
Every flavor of *nix has some form of package management system. Gentoo has portage, Debian has the apt toolset which is also borrowed by Ubuntu, Red Hat, and now Suse, have RPM. Mac OS X, having *nix at its core, is no different.
Enter Fink. Fink is a powerful source-based package management system for OS X written in Perl and maintained by the Fink Project. While there are a number of binary packages available through the project, the available packages are primarily distributed as source and usually require the standard GNU dev toolchain to compile (gcc, make, etc). Either way, it’s easy to use, makes everything you’ll probably ever need to develop software in an OS X dev environment immediately available, and is terminal-based in the good-old unix tradition. There is a GUI that offers basic package management capabilities, but who cares– in my experience I spend so much time at a shell that switching back to the gui costs more time than it saves.
Here’s what you’ll need to install Fink:
- Mac OS X Developer Tools (XCode 2.4 with gcc 4.0, X11)
- The Fink installable binary