Fink is Broken

Fink is an applications package manager for the Macintosh. The Fink mailing list stuff seemed to be down at the time this was written and so instead of sending this somewhere useful it ended up here. This is a rant.

After messing around with Fink 0.8.1 I can now give a justification for avoiding it as much as possible rather than just following my gut feeling after reading the web page.

Fink requires root/administrative privileges to install.

This violates the Safety item specified on the Fink About page. If they really cared about safety then root would not be required. And, yes Virginia, all kinds of people install applications as non-root all the time. One of the nice things about the Mac App system is that a user can just drag an application into place and use it without being an administrative user. Well, fink seems to not give a hoot about that. You claim this doesn't matter? OK, just go ahead and login as root then...enjoy that while it lasts.

Fink does not seem to allow multiple versions of an application to be installed concurrently.

If you've administered systems for any length of time then you will have run into the problem caused by updates breaking a feature that a user cares about. One or more users want to stick with the old version (and sometimes the user is your *boss* and you can't tell them they are a retard) while some users want the new version. The Fink packaging system does not make it easy to deal with this situation. Maintaining two separate Fink directories is not a real solution because it makes the packaging system irrelevant (you might as well just give users tar-balls), its fiddly, and it has the potential to use a lot more disk-space.

And, yes, the method that I use to install applications is not dependent on the root user and allows multiple versions to be installed and used concurrently. No, it is not a packaging system. I fiddle the source (or just type: configure ... yay!) by hand because I am grate (cough).

Ultimately I'm disappointed. I was hoping that Fink would just work and then I wouldn't have to deal with installing all of the usual crap by hand, again. In Fink's defense, I'll say that no commonly used package system (by this I mean rpm/yum, apt, and whatever it is that happens on Microsoft Winders) deals with these issues. Its just that software on the Mac is supposed to be *different*. Right?

Note that I would be perfectly happy to hear that I am wrong about the issues that I am having with Fink. If you want to send me email about that feel free to be mean.