selfupdate and readline support

[robert delius royar]

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 (11:27 -0500 UTC) Shreevatsa R wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>> I said then [1], and still say now, that we need a more general solution
>> that makes MacPorts display a warning to the user if they install software
>> in the prefix /usr/local. We have never supported the user installing
>> software in the prefix /usr/local [2] and it causes problems in many more
>> situations than this. MacPorts should actively inform users that they are
>> doing things they should not, and how to correct them (even if that's only
>> by providing a link to a FAQ entry or Guide section).
>>
>> [1]
>> http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-November/006982.html
>>
>> [2] http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15077
>>
>
> I don't think this is a reasonable policy for MacPorts to have.
> /usr/local is the "standard" location for software manually installed
> by the user. Are you suggesting that
> (1) users should configure all their software with some other prefix, or
> (2) they should not install anything at all outside of MacPorts?
> Neither of them is a practical solution. There are application bundles
> that *do* install to /usr/local, and it is impossible to use "just
> MacPorts" because of the thousands of things that don't work:
> http://trac.macports.org/report/1

Try `grep -R /usr/local /opt/local` just to see how many Macports 
reference files in /usr/local.  If you install Macports gcc, I suspect 
even that tool searches /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib.  The 
auto tools used to install with /usr/local as the preferred place to 
look for configuration files, headers, and libraries.  I haven't checked 
recently, but I suspect that is still the case.

>
> The proper solution is for MacPorts to figure out a way of preventing
> its ports from looking outside ${prefix} -- whether /usr/local or /usr
> or any directory at all.

It is probably not practical, but if ports were each to run a recursive 
sed on source trees to change all references to '/usr/local/' from that 
to '/opt/local', you might get some safety from the /usr/local 
pollution.

-- 
Dr. Robert Delius Royar                   Associate Professor of English
Morehead State University                             Morehead, Kentucky