Carl, I think the additions you suggest are reasonable, but I also wanted to mention an alternative to fink.
Darwinports is another package management tool for OS X which is based on the BSD ports system. One of its cool features (from our standpoint) is that it's built in Tcl and package-installation scripts (called Portfiles) are Tcl scripts.
Walter McGinnis pointed me towards using Darwinports to install OpenACS on OS X. I posted his instructions on my site and have since spent some time creating Portfiles to simplify the process.
Right now, I can do:
$ sudo port install postgresql +devel +server
$ sudo port install openacs
and I end up with an installation of OpenACS 5.0.4 at http://localhost:8000 under unix-user
service0. The OpenACS portfile ensures that all of its dependencies are installed (aolserver, its modules, tdom, postgresql, tclwebtest) and then downloads the OpenACS tarball. Once all the pieces are in place, it runs the cool OpenACS install.sh script.
It's not quite perfect yet because I'm having trouble debugging a process-kill/restart problem, so currently, I have to manually restart the process after my install openacs command.
Installing in this way might be a nice way to try OpenACS out, but it's probably not a good idea for a production site, since it doesn't offer many configuration options, it ignores things like setting up CVS, and darwinports (currently) doesn't offer a way to upgrade a package. You have to uninstall the old version and then install the new version.
I've been reluctant to post about this because I haven't had time to work on it and it's still really rough (and probably incorrect in places!). The right thing to do would be to start submitting these Portfiles to the darwinports project, but frankly I've been lazy 😊
I do think recommending daemontools would be useful, but it's currently not available in fink or darwinports, so it would be another manual step.
