An Honorable Farewell: The Journey of Rudix Comes to a Close (April 1, 2026)
After more than 20 years of dedication, I have made the decision to officially end the development of the Rudix project. This is a farewell to celebrate a mission accomplished, as I believe there is nothing left to prove and no sustainable way to continue with the level of dedication and quality that the project deserves.
Several factors contributed to this decision. The primary catalyst was Apple’s transition to the ARM64 architecture with the Apple Silicon M series. Acquiring a new Mac for development in Brazil has become financially prohibitive. Without the ability to test and build natively for the new architecture, maintaining the standard that Rudix users expect is no longer feasible.
Therefore, all projects under the rudix-mac organization on GitHub will be archived. No further development efforts will be made. The official end of life date is set for April 1, 2026.
A Look Back
Rudix was born in 2005. At that time, the options for package management on macOS were Fink and MacPorts. Both required users to compile everything from source on their own machines. Drawing from my experience with RPM packages, I created a build system using Makefiles inspired by BSD ports.
Rudix was the first build system for Mac that distributed precompiled binary packages. This was long before Homebrew became popular and adopted the same approach. It was a challenging endeavor, especially in the early days when we had to compile universal binaries for both PowerPC and x86 architectures.
I take immense pride in what Rudix became. It was a complex and labor intensive project where I built everything: the ports, the documentation, and the tooling. While I received sporadic contributions, building a mainstream community proved difficult. Rudix never became “mainstream.” Perhaps we missed that window around 2010 when binary distribution gained momentum, but I am proud that we were pioneers.
A Personal Note
Rudix has been much more than a project to me. It has been an excellent “calling card,” opening doors to the best job opportunities I had. I deposited immense energy into these 20 plus years of the project’s life. There is no glamour in maintaining a project like this, and it certainly did not make me rich, but the satisfaction of knowing it was useful to others was my greatest reward.
I ask the community to respect the name “Rudix” as my personal property. It is a name I use as a personal moniker, and I hope it will be treated with the respect it deserves.
The project website at http://rudix.org will eventually transition to my personal site and will no longer serve as the project’s homepage. The historical archives will remain on GitHub.
Thank you to everyone who contributed, used, or supported Rudix throughout this journey. It was hard work, but it was a joy.