co-existing pythons?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 14, 2009, at 10:50, Jack Howarth wrote:

>  Actually one reason I asked the question was that
> while trying to debug the problems I am seeing with
> my test packaging of the molmol molecular modelling
> program, I tried to build molmol against lesstif instead
> of openmotif. In that case, the lesstif package wanted
> me to deactive the openmotif package.

How did the lesstif package tell you this?

I thought maybe the lesstif and openmotif ports were marked as  
conflicting with one another, but that does not appear to be the case.  
But it has only been possible to mark ports as conflicting since  
MacPorts 1.8.0 which has only been out since August 27, 2009, so it  
could still be that the ports do conflict and that conflicts key still  
needs to be added to these ports.

> What exactly
> does this deactivation do?

Deactivating a port removes its files from ${prefix} thus making them  
unavailable.

> Will binaries built against
> lesstif and openmotif run at the same time?

If they conflict and install the same files, then you can only have  
one or the other.

> In fink
> we have lesstif-bin, openmotif3-bin and openmotif4-bin
> packages that conflict with each other. However
> this doesn't really impact running binaries from
> packages built against the different motifs at the
> same time. The 'deactivation' prompt was a little
> scary since it doesn't clearly indicate that this
> process won't make the deactivated motif non-functional.

Deactivating a port will almost certainly make software that depends  
on it nonfunctional.