~/.macports

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

I am the person who has this problem --- about 3 Gb of stuff in ~/.macports
and a Time Machine that goes berserk, running mtmd [1] at about 90% CPU
during "port clean" for example.  I have had to turn Time Machine off.

On 10/02/2015, at 10:47 PM, Clemens Lang wrote:
> ----- On 10 Feb, 2015, at 11:37, René J.V. Bertin rjvbertin at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> As I said, my ~/.macports on my Mac appears to be unused since november 2013 or
>> so. However, the tiny test install I have on my Linux system does contain a lot
>> of things that appear to be copies, but also things like "home" the function of
>> which is unclear to me.
> 
> ~/.macports is used instead of /opt/local/var/macports when you run MacPorts in
> a root installation but without root privileges. As such, MacPorts will put
> downloaded tarballs, work directories and build support files there when you,
> for example, run
>  port build qt4-mac # note the lack of sudo
> The "home" directory in there is used as a target for $HOME during build, because
> some builds require a writable home but the default of the macportsuser is not,
> and we don't want to clutter your real home with whatever $buildsystem thinks it
> wants to put there.

Thank you for a very clear explanation.  And thank you, too, for Macports' concern
at not wanting to clutter my "real" home directory.  That is most professional.

> You can simply delete ~/.macports

Do you mean "rm -rf ~/.macports"?  I am in the middle of a build of René's new
qt5-mac-devel port, which failed with compiler error messages in my machine.

Maybe a "port clean" first?…  But then there will still be downloaded tarballs
and maybe untarred source code in there…  I do not mind starting from scratch.
The download and extract steps took only about an hour.

On 11/02/2015, at 1:37 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 9:30 AM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday February 10 2015, Brandon Allbery wrote regarding "Re: ~/.macports"
> > > Not supported, not a great idea, not an outright installation-breaking
> > > idea. (Among other potential problems, a Portfile bug could nuke your home
> > > directory; with a dedicates macports user, it would get a permission error.)
> 
> > True, but that kind of bugs are unlikely to appear in released ports, or so I'd hope. In any case I've never yet had this > happen to me.
> 
> I think someone did have this (try to) happen to them recently-ish. I also know people who had a Homebrew installation eat itself, because it does everything as the logged-in user.
> 
> I strongly prefer safety in things like this.


Amen to that, brother!  I have probably done more builds than some people have
had hot dinners, going back many decades.  Taking shortcuts never pays…  The
few seconds or minutes you might save are sooner or later eclipsed by hours of
stuffing around, as I am experiencing currently.

From now on I want to use sudo, have a local-port structure that is NOT in /opt/local
and have NO modifications of standard permissions in /opt/local.

But how do I get there, *safely*, from where I am?

A crashed "port destroot" run, a garbaged-up home directory, a local-port structure
inside /opt/local and maybe a wobbly portindex.

I am not an expert in MacPorts, just a user… but I still have a little intelligence and
knowledge of UNIX left… :-)  Well, I am a KDE developer too, which is why I am
doing this stuff.  We need to prepare for KF5/Frameworks in MacPorts, and to be
able to install and run qt4-mac, qt5-mac, KF5 apps and KDE4 apps concurrently.

@René: I need a new set of instructions for running the qt5-mac-devel build.

Best regards, Ian W.

[1] mtmd = Mobile Time Machine Demon, man 8 mtmd