Using fink to install from a website

Question

I want to use fink to install smalltalk. I found this on the fink website. I was wondering if there was some way to install smalltalk from the url (sudo fink install smalltalk does not work). Is there a way to do this? Or do I not understand fink correctly?

Answer 1

The smalltalk package is in the unstable branch of fink, so you need to temporarily enable unstable branches to download it.

From their FAQ:

There's this package in unstable that I want to install, but the fink command just says 'no package found'. How can I install it?

For fink-0.26 and later: If you run fink configure one of the questions will ask whether you want to turn the unstable trees on.

None of these options actually download the unstable tree's package descriptions.You'll need to turn on rsync or cvs updating to do this, which is not set up by default on a new Fink installation. The following command sequence will set you up on a new Fink installation:

fink selfupdate

followed by

fink selfupdate-rsync

or

fink selfupdate-cvs

and then

 fink index -f fink scanpackages

Note: There are Fink Commander analogs for everything except fink index -f. You will have to use the command line for that.

If you're already set up with rsync or cvs updating, then the following command sequence (or the Fink Commander analogs) will suffice:

fink selfupdate 
fink index 
fink scanpackages