Accessing a MacPorts tree from another [local] system

[Frank Stock]

Somewhat similar situation 6 months ago.  Maybe its an idea that will help with what you want.
I needed a MacPorts install with a custom prefix on a 10.13.x machine.
Custom prefix means you cannot use pre-built binaries, and at the time Rust and Cargo were not buildable on that platform.

I ended up installing a standard MacPorts installation containing Rust and Cargo (which used the pre-built versions of those because they were in the standard location).
Then because what I needed in the custom prefix depended on, but did not include, Rust or Cargo, I was able to simply symlink those into my custom prefix and get everything built that I needed.

-Frank

> On Aug 11, 2024, at 2:27 PM, Daniel J. Luke <dluke at geeklair.net> wrote:
> 
> On Aug 11, 2024, at 4:15 PM, Sergey Fedorov <vital.had at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> For testing purposes, I want to use an existing MacPorts installation with another local system (same major darwin version, different minor). Is there a way to do that besides actually copying the whole tree (or reproducing it via installing)?
>> 
>> Specifically, I want to try building a few specific ports, but I neither want to build everything from scratch (that will take days of compilation) nor ditto a multi-gigabyte tree (that is feasible but inconvenient).
>> Simply symlinking /opt/local from a volume with MacPorts into /opt/local on a system of interest does not work correctly.\
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/ShareArchives2 might help (you'll copy files over but won't have to build from scratch.
> 
>> Any alternatives which will actually work as intended? I.e. I want a clean system to use /opt/local from another volume.
>> Or can I configure MacPorts on the system of interest to use a prefix pointing to ${another_local_volume}/opt/local?
> 
> Yon can build base from source and point macports point to a different directory.
> 
> I had a version of MacPorts working where /opt/local was a symlink some time ago (I had a local patch to fixup some of the problems, but I can't find it now). IIRC setting prefix in macports.conf made things mostly work.
> 
> -- 
> Daniel J. Luke
>