Daniel Lemire's blog

, 3 min read

Why Fink is broken for anything but non-X applications

2 thoughts on “Why Fink is broken for anything but non-X applications”

  1. Absolutely Scott. My post is not fair (and was not meant to be fair) to the maintainers of Fink.

    For the record, it looks like I got KDE running well, and certainly, XFig does work well now.

  2. Scott Flinn says:

    Since I have been named in public here, I’ll add just a few more comments so that my position is not misrepresented. I’ll begin, for the benefit of anybody else who might be reading, by noting that Daniel and I went through a lengthy exchange on this topic and ultimately agreed on just about everything. (At least I think we did.)

    For example, we are in complete agreement that Apple has done a terrible job with their deployment of X11, especially for OSX Tiger.

    Where we differ is that I have given Daniel the idea that I am a big Fink advocate — moreso than I intended. I probably didn’t intend to say that Fink is a GOOD solution so much as that it is the BEST solution. What would this post look like if you took Fink out of the equation altogether. Do you think it would be as “easy” to get KDE apps running on OS X? I personally think the process would then be measured in weeks or even months rather than hours. If someone’s objective is to get X11 apps running on OSX, do you think the best advice is really to tell them to avoid Fink because its X11 support is broken?

    As a long time developer, I personally think that Fink — for all its shortcomings — is a tremendous accomplishment, and its maintainers should be proud of their work. I therefore think that they are deserving of both respect and gratitude. It’s an open source project, and the usual open source rules apply: if you don’t think it’s good, feel free to step in and improve it. If I have demonstrated any Fink zealotry, that’s where it comes from — not from some belief that the software is flawless.

    Just to pick on one comment at random, regarding the disclaimer that many Fink ports have not been tested on Intel Macs:

    “What??? You mean the guys who maintain this have no idea if it even builds and no incentive to find out? Gosh! Maybe this explains why none of this works.”

    I suspect this comment reflects a lot of your frustration at the end of a long day as much as it does your considered opinion that Fink is a lame effort. But, to illustrate my point, I might suggest that if you were to offer to buy some of the Fink volunteers some Intel Macs to test with, they might have more incentive to spend their time porting apps for you.

    For the record, I know from first-hand experience that you (Daniel) are a very smart guy with a lot of experience and success dealing with complex open source software of all kinds. If you experienced frustration, then I have no doubt it was well deserved. Can we agree that Apple is the *more* deserving target for criticism here?