[ant5]

> Oh, please... Apple could have used dpkg if they wanted to.

Apple chose not to given the apparent community stance.

> dpkg is open source software released under the GPL license. Apple just chose not to, because they would have had to open source all their code that linked to dpkg libraries.

> That is the price they would have to pay for piggy-backing on the efforts of many volunteers and gain immediate access to a state of the art packaging system.

Neither dpkg nor apt-get have any libraries to link against, so that really wasn't the issue.

> But of course Apple being Apple has a lot more money to spend on PR and along with the help of their fan boys, the story turned into "Debian developers are mean, capitalism-hating hippies". I am not really surprised.*

This isn't an Apple PR story. This is something I just told you, recollected from nearly a decade ago when the mere possibility of using dpkg was on the table.

... Although, I have to say, your modern response really rather lends some credence to my ancient recollection.

[rdtsc]

> Apple chose not to given the apparent community stance.

Apple still could have used it. It is open source, that is the point of open source. Redhat might not like that CentOS is recompiling their source and release their distribution. But there is nothing they can do.

> Neither dpkg nor apt-get have any libraries to link against, so that really wasn't the issue.

Not true. There is libapt, synaptic depends on it, for example. Unless they intended their users to open terminals (oh the horror), they would have had to link against libapt to create a responsive installer GUI. Otherwise they would have had to parse stdout of external processes.

> This isn't an Apple PR story. This is something I just told you, recollected from nearly a decade ago when the mere possibility of using dpkg was on the table.

I understand it is not an Apple PR story in this case. It just seemed that the story wasn't true and it seems to me often enough the untrue stories always favor those who have most fanboys or largest PR pockets.

[ant5]

> Apple still could have used it. It is open source, that is the point of open source.

Yes, but Apple chose not to. It had nothing to do with legal reasons.

> Not true. There is libapt, synaptic depends on it, for example.

Sorry, you're correct. There was a nascent libapt, but at the time, we just wanted dpkg, and as rbanffy noted, we could always run apt as a separate binary.

It really wasn't a "fear the GPL" response.

> I understand it is not an Apple PR story in this case. It just seemed that the story wasn't true and it seems to me often enough the untrue stories always favor those who have most fanboys or largest PR pockets.

OK. But it's why I was told we couldn't use dpkg. I don't know if you recall what Apple and Mac OS X was like before the 10.0 release, but both were very different beasts than they are today, and Apple had some very different priorities in respect to UNIX, the existing UNIX community, et al.

[rbanffy]

> Unless they intended their users to open terminals

They could run it on a separate process and deal with stdin/stdout within a GUI program. No problem that way either.

[rdtsc]

Even better they could have assigned some devs to create dpkg and apt options to output stdout data in a structured format (xml for ex) to facilitate this kind of interaction. Bazaar has that for example.

The downside is that that could significantly slow down the application, depending on the types of queries and commands that are performed.