Would you love apt-get on a mac?

As Ubuntu kept maturing i kept on gradually liking the "apt-get install" command in ubuntu to the point this felt like a hinderance on other linux flavours more notably Mac.

To my surprise there is a tool available to make apt-get work in mac, this is fink (http://www.finkproject.org).  The binary is available to download for 10.5 and lower, for the rest who have moved on it seems the only option is to compile and install from source as per the instructions on the fink website.

I had 10.8 (Mountain Lion) installed and as the fink site suggests i had to compile using source, before i could install fink i had to install xcode and xcode developer tools (xcode > preferences > downloads > developer tools)

xcode-select -switch /path/to/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

I had to accept a license for Xcode build by reading and typing 'accept'

sudo xcodebuild -license

Unpack tar.gz manually or double click in your browsers download, if you want to manually uncompress 

cd $HOME/Downloads

followed by

tar -xvf fink-0.34.4.tar.gz

or

tar -xvf fink-0.34.4.tar

where the choice depends on whether the source has already been partially unpacked, e.g. by Safari.

Then run the following commands in a terminal window:

cd /Users//Downloads/fink-0.34.4 

or wherever you have downloaded and un-packed fink and run the following command:

sudo ./bootstrap /Applications/fink

Sit back, relax and keep glancing at your terminal window to choose options at prompts, for most options default is fine, for geographic locations you may want to select the one closest to you.

After the installation is completed, running the command without sudo - this will comeup with a prompt this will allow you to configure apt-get to work from any part of your system.

/Applications/fink/bin/pathsetup.sh

After this do the following:

fink selfupdate-rsync

fink index -f

Once this is completed you should be able to use apt-get in mac!!!