Well, it appears fink will need to be reinstalled if I ever want to update anything I have currently under its care.
That’s annoying, to say the least. To rebuild everything last week took 24 hours, even after I updated the stale .info file for tar.
I have today removed xfree86 with dpkg –remove –force-depends xfree86-base and then set about rebuilding it from scratch. It seemed like it was going to work, but something still not right.
I may take a look at fink’s Engine.pm, which is where the error message appears: maybe I can figure out what conditions trigger it.
There are some other contenders: perhaps the GNU-Darwin collection has matured enough to try again. Having access to the FreeBSD ports collection would be nice.
There’s also a move to port Gentoo Linux’s Portage system to Darwin/OS X. You can find out more about it here and here.