[Ifeffit] Ifeffit for Mac OS X / Fink

[Matt Newville]

Hi Paul,

Just to be clear, I mean a 'Fink-friendly' installer to allow a user
to run 'horae_update' if g77 works, which probably means having Fink
installed.  It would not use any Fink packages itself.

> I believe currently, using my installation of horae, ifeffit and
> friends, Bruce's script works "out of the box".  I have installed
> horae and ifeffit on a friend's machine which works nicely using
> the fink installed packages (but not using fink itself for the
> installation yet).  On my own machine, I have upgraded to the
> latest version of perl, etc. and things are a little more
> complicated (but not much).

horae_update sort of works for me, but not well enough to use with
the binary installer.  It tries to build Ifeffit.bs, the link
between perl and the ifeffit library.  Currently, this gives several
warnings about unneeded Framework stuff and produces a non-working
Ifeffit.bs for me:  This seems to be due to how ifeffit wants to
link with my version of the PGPLOT library.  This is solvable, but
it means altering Makefile.PL (and probably re-building PGPLOT to
make Makefile.PL easier).  Another issue is that horae_update
installs to /usr/local/bin, which means the clickable icons in
/Applications/Ifeffit won't point to the updated versions.  Again,
that's a small Mac-specific alteration to Makefile.PL.  BTW, none of
this is Bruce's fault: using /Applications/Ifeffit is very
Mac-specific, and horae_update expects 'normal perl on Unix' rules.

Re: Aquaterm, I'd be willing to include this (I beleive I'd also
need to include Aquaterm.app in the binary installer.  That's OK,
but Aquaterm claims to be in alpha-phase, so might not be the best
idea). I have not tried building the latest Aquaterm.  I should
rebuild PGPLOT anyway, so I'm willing to try this.

Finally, For what it's worth, my view is that building from source
is ALWAYS better than using a binary.  As an example, the current
binary installer of Ifeffit for Mac only works on 10.3.  The source
code can be made to work on 10.2 as well, and will likely work on
10.4.  Binary packages from Fink or debian do not adequately manage
'dependencies', no matter what they may claim.

--Matt