Chapter 6. Creating and Installing Packages
Just because you can build all your applications from source doesn’t mean that you should. Linux users are spoiled by the wealth of applications that they can download as Red Hat or Debian packages. FreeBSD users have the best of both worlds (packaged software and building from source) through the vast number of applications in /usr/ports. Mac OS X users can tap into this wealth of applications through the Fink and GNU-Darwin projects.
However, if you go through the trouble of building applications from source, you might want to package the resulting binaries for distribution so others can install the package, you can reinstall it at a later time without needing to rebuild it from source, or you can install it on multiple machines. Mac OS X is quite rich in the number of options available for packaging.
This chapter covers the Fink and GNU-Darwin distributions, as well as the packaging tools that come with Mac OS X’s Developer Tools, and shows you how to package your application for distribution.
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