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Andy White
Asked: 2009-10-02 20:09:54 +0800 CST

Package management on Mac OS X

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Can anyone recommend a package management tool like apt-get or yum for Mac OS X? I've seen that Fink has ported apt-get to Mac OS X, is this a good way to go, or are there other/better options out there?

mac-osx

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are three more well known package management applications for Mac OS X:

    • Fink that you mentioned.
    • MacPorts which is hosted with Apple's Open Source Projects (eg. CalendarServer) and tends to have the largest and most up to date collection of packages.
    • Homebrew which is relatively recent and has a much smaller set of packages.
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  2. Try mac ports it has a great repository of applications ready to go for your mac.

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  3. not exactly "package management" in the same sense as *NIX package management, but AppFresh has made my life much much easier. I also use MacPorts for adding *NIX tools.

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  4. There is also pkgsrc from NetBSD available for Mac OS X, but I found it less stable than MacPorts.

    Coming from a BSD world I prefer MacPorts over Fink, but if you are a friend of debian you might be best suited with Fink.

    Still have to try HomeBrew myself, but the concept that it re-uses existing components from my OS X base has kept from from it until now. I don't share Apple's policy regarding versioning of third party components.

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