Darwin

I am a developer at the OpenDarwin project. Foremost I am involved in the DarwinPorts subproject where I am one of the three project leaders. OpenDarwin was founded jointly by the ISC and Apple but is independent from both. It's caring about the open source Unix-underpinning of Apple's MacOS-X. We are not trying to fork away from Apple's OS like GNU Darwin, but would like to bring new features to Darwin. We also make releases of OpenDarwin that come without any non-free (free as in beer) software and runs on PPC and x86. Hexley

DarwinPorts is about creating a ports systems for Darwin like the other BSD Unices do have.

If you are already caring about a port in one of the BSDs ports collections, at the fink project or in any linux system, consider bringing your experience and knowledge to DarwinPorts!

Here is a list of articles I have found about us on the net:

Introduction to The DarwinPorts Project, article from Landon Fuller for daemon news, October 2002
Interview with Jordan Hubbard of Apple and OpenDarwin, an interview with Jordan Hubbard about DarwinPorts, April 2003
Managing Packages on Panther with DarwinPorts, technical article on oreillynet, April 2004
Interview with me about DarwinPorts, Apple and Open Source (in german), December 2004

If you want to fetch all sources of a specific port - e. g. you want to build it later but won't have iternet access then, put this nifty funtion in your .bashrc

fetch_deps() {
    for i in `port deps $1 | tr -d "\ r"`; do
        echo $i
        port fetch $i;
        fetch_deps $i;
    done
}

Creating a port is really easy; there is an exquisit documentation available. The Portfiles tend to be small - probably less than half the size of equivalent rpm description or freebsd-port Makefiles. If you happen to be a programmer involved in an open source project, please create a Portfile for darwinports, so we all can share your work without having to have a degree in rocket science...

If you don't know what port to write, perhaps have a look at the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory on the server of the GNU project.

There is still lots of work to do, and if you are a tcl-programmer or just want to write some documentation or some Portfiles, you're for sure welcome. Even just using DarwinPorts and perhaps finding some bugs (and of course reporting them to us) will help.

You can join us live on irc #darwinports or #opendarwin where you will probably find comments like:

jkh:    but, just like gnu-darwin, we don't code
fkr:    ahoi!
Leimy:  Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar [POOPS]
kvv:    apolitical, amoral, and aproductive.
jkh:    then we implement a high-speed XML packet switch in silicon and IPO with the stock symbol "XISCO"
toby:   python ports!
jasonc: and all discussions on #opendarwin end with lisp advocacy for some reason...

Projects which link to their darwinports port: