[OS X TeX] OT: gnutar 1.22

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Wed 13th Jan, 2010 at 17:45, Alex Hamann seems to have written:

>
> On 13.01.2010, at 17:29, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>
>>
>> Am 13.01.2010 um 16:56 schrieb Alex Hamann:
>>
>>> Has anyone been able to build gnutar 1.22 on Snow Leopard?
>>
>>
>> I presume Fink and MacPorts both are...
>
> Right, I saw that. But I was hoping someone on the list has more personal experience. I got rid of macports long ago and would not want to reinstall it nor fink for that matter.

Since I'm on Tiger (and PPC to boot), I can't speak about this in
particular. In general, though, MacPorts can be a wonderful resource
even if you're compiling yourself. The trick is to get hold of the
portfile for the package you want to compile. This is just a text
document. You can see which options MacPorts passes to the compiler,
whether they are using any custom patch files etc. If they are using
patch files, you can download these (again, just text files) and apply
them to the source manually before compiling. Sometimes you may not
wish to follow everything MacPorts has decided. (Maybe you want to
compile with different options etc.) But very often a portfile and/or
patch from MacPorts has enabled me to compile and install something
successfully which had me completely stumped otherwise.

You may be able to do the same with Fink but I've never tried so I'm
not sure whether it is possible to find just parts of their system as
text files in quite the same way.

If you do this kind of thing a lot, it's useful to write a shell script
to automate download of portfiles, patches and the MacPorts index of
available software. (The index is useful to figure out which category
software is listed under as this affects the location of the portfile
and any patches.) However, if you just do it very occasionally, it is
easier to just use the web to find things.

Note that none of this requires an installation of MacPorts or Fink.
Nor does it require installing packages in the locations they favour. I
use MacPorts info to compile stuff I'm going to install in /usr/local
but it could be anywhere.

- cfr