Hi Christian,
On 4/2/07, Christian Jaeger christian@jaeger.mine.nu wrote:
I'm not using Mac OS X, but I remember that the ports system is using Debian's APT under the hood ...
You're probably thinking of Fink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fink). MacPorts (formerly known as DarwinPorts) is rather different, and closer to FreeBSD ports or Gentoo ebuilds than the Debian package system: there are no pre-built binary packages, everything is fetched and built from source.
...and thought I'd mention the naming of the Gambit-C package in Debian (I'm not the maintainer, Kurt B. Kaiser is), for what it's worth:
Before submitting Gambit to MacPorts I checked the various packaging systems like Debian, Gentoo, *BSD, etc. I'm guessing the Debian package name is probably due to the existence of another unrelated "gambit" package in Debian, and the obvious alternative name, "gambit-c", was perhaps not chosen since it is not very Debianesque due to the spurious non-significant hyphen.
Package names in MacPorts tend to be more human-friendly than in Debian, so I went with "gambit-c". This also ensures that when somebody does a "port search gambit" lookup, they'll instantly find what they're looking for, which would not be the case with a port named "gambc".