Permissions problem

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 23, 2007, at 04:47, Eelke Klein wrote:

> I have not used macports for sometime so I tried a selfupdate today  
> but had permission problems. I tried to fix it by downloading and  
> installing the latest version from the website but it didn't help.  
> Here is the output for the selfupdate command:
>
> $sudo port -vd selfupdate
> Password:
> DEBUG: Rebuilding the MacPorts base system if needed.
> DEBUG: Synchronizing ports tree(s)
> Synchronizing from rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/
> DEBUG: /usr/bin/rsync -rtzv --delete-after rsync:// 
> rsync.macports.org/release/ports/ /opt/local/var/macports/sources/ 
> rsync.macports.org/release/ports
> receiving file list ... done
>
> sent 74 bytes  received 271264 bytes  25841.71 bytes/sec
> total size is 14810501  speedup is 54.58
> DEBUG: MacPorts base dir: /opt/local/var/macports/sources/ 
> rsync.macports.org/release/base
> DEBUG: Setting user: root
> MacPorts base version 1.5 installed
> DEBUG: Updating using rsync
> receiving file list ... done
>
> sent 73 bytes  received 5406 bytes   2191.60 bytes/sec
> total size is 3628144  speedup is 662.19
> Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.5
> The MacPorts installation is not outdated and so was not updated
> DEBUG: Setting ownership to root
> DEBUG: Couldn't change permissions: couldn't create error file for  
> command: no such file or directory
>     while executing
> "macports::selfupdate [array get global_options]"
> Error: /opt/local/bin/port: selfupdate failed: Couldn't change  
> permissions: couldn't create error file for command: no such file  
> or directory
>
> I did recently replace the boot drive and moved the system by  
> making a bootable backup using silverkeeper. After this I moved the  
> user folders to a second harddrive. However because I do not use  
> macports very often the problem could have allready existed before  
> I replaced the drive without me knowing.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Eelke
>
> PS. In case it matters it is a Mac Pro with OS X 10.4.10

I don't know why it's doing that. I'm not familiar with silverkeeper  
so I'm not sure what it has done (or not done) while migrating your  
data.

If nobody else has a suggestion of how to fix your existing MacPorts  
installation, one option would of course be to move /opt/local out of  
the way and then reinstall MacPorts and all your ports from scratch.  
How much work this is for you depends I suppose on how much of your  
own data is in /opt/local that you would need to retrieve/migrate.  
(Configuration files in /opt/local/etc? mysql databases in /opt/local/ 
var? apache2 configuration files in /opt/local/apache2? etc.)