The engineering effort required is too far outside their business focus. They've got a very basic one, but nothing in terms of what modern Linuxers are used to. They've blessed macports as their preferred one, which does a reasonable job.
As far as I've seen, apple will include the latest stable version of a tool per major upgrade (e.g. tiger, leopard, etc.). They'll keep it the same version until the next major one, without touching point releases. In terms of the principle of least surprises, it's actually the way I'd prefer.
The other post's advice for .bashrc is very good, it's what I do.
FWIW, macports is linked to from http://macosforge.org/ - which is open source stuff hosted by Apple and worked on by Apple engineers for the most part.
Apple actually had one of the old-time Debian guys, Klee Dienes, for a number of years, starting way back in 1997. I guess he wasn't successful in convincing them to do things properly.
Comments
The engineering effort required is too far outside their business focus. They've got a very basic one, but nothing in terms of what modern Linuxers are used to. They've blessed macports as their preferred one, which does a reasonable job.
As far as I've seen, apple will include the latest stable version of a tool per major upgrade (e.g. tiger, leopard, etc.). They'll keep it the same version until the next major one, without touching point releases. In terms of the principle of least surprises, it's actually the way I'd prefer.
The other post's advice for .bashrc is very good, it's what I do.
The engineering effort required is too far outside their business focus.
Then they should stop claiming that OSX is suitable for use as a server OS.
Muahahaha, that's just an inside joke :-)
Seriously, apple only cares enough about servers/etc to have a complete solution for their other markets, such as small business & education.
Why not just adopt .deb and apt?
Same response to macports below: Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
I suspect they've got the same problem others do: a case of NIH, without the resources to invent it themselves.
Ugh.
FWIW, macports is linked to from http://macosforge.org/ - which is open source stuff hosted by Apple and worked on by Apple engineers for the most part.
Apple actually had one of the old-time Debian guys, Klee Dienes, for a number of years, starting way back in 1997. I guess he wasn't successful in convincing them to do things properly.
They should strip out their custom builds and have macports pre-installed.