Of interest to Mac owning geeks; Open Darwin Ports has a set of Mac OS X install packages for most, but not all, their ports. They are just short of 15 hundred of these. Lots of fun esoteric stuff; elang, maxima, openmcl. All the misc. libraries for python, java, etc. etc.

Until yesterday I was mounting their webdav server via the finder when I wanted stuff; but that is often really slow.

Here’s an example of doing the same kind of thing from the command line.

   mkdir mpoint
   mount_webdav packages.opendarwin.org/ mpoint
   cd mpoint
   find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 2 -name '*.mpkg' > package_list.txt
   umount mpoint
   rmdir mpoint

That gives you a list all the available packages.

Here’s an example of that installs aquaterm. That’s found in the ports that are grouped under the name aqua; i.e. the
things that require Mac OS X’s aqua.

   mkdir mpoint
   mount_webdav packages.opendarwin.org/ mpoint
   /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Installer mpoint/aqua/aquaterm-0.3.2.mpkg
   umount mpoint
   rmdir mpoint

That long overly clever way of firing up the Installer has the benefit that if that was a script the umount happen after the installer exits.