Am I the only one using standalone Darwin? You find tons of information on how to install stuff on MacOSX machines and binary packages are distributed as *.dmg installers, which I don't know how to open on a command line.

I set up a VMware virtual machine with Darwin 8.0.1 to compile stuff on my PC which hopefully will be compatible with my Mac. Darwin installation is pretty straight forward. GCC, make and all those pretty things are already there, now only subversion is missing to get me started.

The easiest way would probably be to compile the subversion package and it's dependancies. But I want a package manager to do right that. There it comes: Darwin Ports!

CVS is already on the Darwin distro, so we can checkout the latest Darwin Ports sources and compile them. The steps are (assuming you are root, use sudo otherwise):

mkdir /usr/dports
cd /usr/dports
cvs -d \
:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.opendarwin.org:/Volumes/src/cvs/od \
login
cvs -d \
:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.opendarwin.org:/Volumes/src/cvs/od \
co -P darwinports

If prompted for a password, simply press the enter-key. This got me an error the first time, because some file was not present, but seemed to have been created in the process. I simply had to call the last command again. Now it's time to compile:

cd darwinports
mv * ../
cd ..
rm -r darwinports
cd base
./configure
make
make install

Now you got the port command in /opt/local/bin. Add this to your path or create a link if you want to access it globally.

To synchronize the package-list do

port -d selfupdate
port sync

Great! We now have a really cool package manager. port install subversion started to install the dependencies apr-utils, openssl, neon. apr-utils is dependent on apr, expat, db4, libiconv.

This was the next problem: Fetching libiconv never terminated, although it's just a ~3MB file. I waited for hours, it never finished. I was about to remove the whole package manager thing and compile subversion manually, but then I went on to check out Darwin Ports' directories.

And in /opt/local/var/db/dports/distfiles I found what i was looking for. All installed packages have a directory with it's *.tar.gz archive inside. libiconv only had a partial archive inside. Now I simply fetched that archive using ftp and let Darwin Ports do the rest.

Now I got subversion set up on Darwin and am ready to find out if I really can produce MacOSX86 binaries on my PC now.