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I don't want to start a holywar, but as far as I am concerned, I am on track according to the faq.

I wanted to know the key differences between macports and fink. I am a long time macports user and am looking for some fresh blood (if I may say so). I was looking towards fink. I'd appreciate it if anyone listed out a few differences between these two package management systems.

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    You'd have to ask why everyone now prefers homebrew rather than old timey package managers like fink or macports to start a religious war now a days.
    – bmike
    Aug 14, 2011 at 20:15

2 Answers 2

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Fink is a binary distribution using tools that originated from Debian (e.g., apt-get, etc.)

Macports is built around the philosophy used by the FreeBSD ports collection. In this you download tarballs directly from the upstream source, apply patches and compile. It's entirely automated.

I haven't used Fink in quite a while (since Panther) because it didn't seem very well done to me.

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  • fink also installs from source usually later versions in its unstable release
    – mmmmmm
    Aug 14, 2011 at 20:10
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Not to hijack, but if you're really looking for a cleaner option, try homebrew. I switched a while back and it's been great.

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    Define cleaner please
    – mmmmmm
    Aug 14, 2011 at 20:11
  • Less dependency bloat
    – user588
    Aug 15, 2011 at 3:56

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