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Originally Posted by jruschme
I suppose I have to ask the obvious question and wonder what is wrong with the regular Mac OS X version of Calibre?
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with the regular version of Calibre on OSX. I heavily use MacPorts as a convenient way to decrease install size of everything I have on OSX and to provide easier updating to non-Apple software packages. A good example is that VLC and GIMP both you many of the larger libraries Calibre uses, an install through MacPorts cuts the size down in half or less of each individual install. Also to update one can call "sudo port upgrade all" or simply "sudo port upgrade <portname>". I have no problems whatsoever with the regular version, this would be a different way of building, installing, and updating the regular version.
The other advantage worth mentioning is if at some point add-ons of various flavors, conversion scripts, etc... Get changed or used, it's easy to have them as additional installations of the main package. It also allows for being able to build Calibre to the architecture of the machine that it's being installed on. For example on a 64bit machine with a Snow Leopard install, an exclusively 64-bit python package could be used as the dependency (actually this isn't necessarily true on technical levels but serves to illustrate the point). In the end it's just a different way of managing the software you have installed, getting new software, and updating it. I can tell you that I'd estimate the size of an update file for Calibre could be pushed under 5mb for a lot of the updates instead of redownloading the .dmg that's ~60mb and that the installed .app file could probably be 1/2 the size or so (currently a little over 200MB from a dmg install)
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Also, FTY, I noticed that Calibre has a NetBSD pkgsrc build, which means it could be built on Mac OS X that way (and would probably also be a good basis for a Darwin Ports port, etc.).[/QUOTE]
Thanks for that tip. I actually have a package made in my own repository for building Calibre, but it needs to be expanded, since I don't bother to check architecture, and some other things that a more proper port would.