[OS X TeX] xpdf i-Package?

[Jens Nöckel]

On Dec 14, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 14 déc. 05 à 13:07, Martin Henning a écrit :
>
>> btw, use fink instead of darwinports - they also have binaries so you 
>> don't have to compile everything...
>
> Thanks for the pointer to Fink.
>
> I have been hearing about Fink for a long time. However, I must admit 
> that once I read it places its binaries from /sw/bin before the System 
> ones from /bin in the default path, I did not consider it any further. 
> I have a number of colleagues who do some programming, use Fink 
> happily and swear by it. But given I do no programming -- yet -- my 
> point of view is different: have an OS X-centric computer world, and 
> only complement OS X in the areas where it doesn't already provide a 
> solution; and never, ever, override it.

Hi  Bruno,

I've been using fink since 2001 and have only good things to say about 
it. Fink is extremely careful to be non-invasive, and the fact that it 
installs practically everything in its own completely separate 
directory /sw guarantees that you can easily remove anything you want 
from it without interfering with your system. The path variable is set 
so as to make fink commands the default, but system commands always 
remain accessible by prefixing them with /bin, /usr/bin etc.
In some cases, it is really better to override system commands. Without 
looking up more examples, I can think of the two commands that didn't 
work properly in Mac OS X when I decided to install their fink 
versions: psync and locate. For programmers, there any many additional 
reasons to be more up-to-date than Apple's system by using fink (or 
darwinports or portage).

Regarding TeX, I used to be completely on GWTeX, but switched to fink 
at some point mainly because it was more convenient (any updates to 
tetex are automatically taken care of together with all the other 
software updates from fink). And although fink's package is not nearly 
as cutting-edge as Gerben's, the advantage for me has been great 
stability of the tex system (of course all tex stuff is also in /sw, 
and that includes your local package installations).

Regards,
Jens

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