Well, it turned out to be more complicated than I expected. The binary installation I did in Mac OS X failed when some files were moved at Sourceforge. So I had to pull them down by hand: annoying and inconvenient but not a showstopper.
On Darwin — the Aqua-less version — it was worse. Binary installations are not an option, and installing from source was frustrating.
There are two problems: one is the lack of a command-line file transfer tool, like wget or curl. curl is part of the OS X base install, so why it’s not in Darwin is beyond me. But I have two other OS X machines, so copying it across was no big deal.
Harder to resolve was the fact that the base files have been moved and the install can’t gracefully pick up from an aborted install. If I had it to do over, I would:
- create a /sw/src hierarchy
- transfer all the files from http://fink.sourceforge.net/bindist/dists/fink-0.4.0/main/source/base/ into /sw/src
- at this point you can simply follow the instructions that come with the install kit.
That seems like a simplified version of what I ended up doing. An added bonus: the selfupdate command sets up CVS automagically, so you can track the releases as often as you like. I have done almost daily for months and had almost no problems with the quality of the releases.