"man port" not working?

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Tue Oct 9 02:06:17 PDT 2007


On Oct 9, 2007, at 03:23, Marcus D'Camp wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 03:01:29PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> I also see /usr/local in that path. Stuff in /usr/local can interfere
>> with MacPorts too. I recommend you remove everything from /usr/local
>> and use MacPorts to install whatever software you need. If software
>> you need is not in MacPorts, portfiles can be added.
>
> Sorry to hijack the thread, I too have a /usr/local/ on my system.  Is
> it safe to rm -r /usr/local/* ? The only think I had installed was  
> mutt
> which has been replaced with the MacPort.  Actually on second glance,
> my nearly vanilla Powerbook I also have a /usr/local/ from Carbon
> Copy Cloner if I remember right (psync and other perl related).
> I've removed all the mutt related binaries, should I be ok?

I don't know if it's ok to "rm -rf /usr/local"; only you know what  
you have in there and whether you're using it. Probably safer to "mv / 
usr/local /usr/local-off" and see if all Hell breaks loose. If it  
does, you can reinstate /usr/local until you figure out how to un- 
break it. But if everything's fine after, say, a week, then you can  
probably nuke /usr/local. But first check and make sure you don't  
have any data in there you need. For example, the official MySQL  
binaries install into /usr/local/mysql and all your databases are in / 
usr/local/mysql/data, so if you use that MySQL distribution, erasing / 
usr/local would erase your databases, which you probably wouldn't want.

Some things in /usr/local are ok. Applications (like mutt) are not  
too dangerous to have there. It's libraries than can cause problems.  
One issue we keep encountering is users who have weird old versions  
of the readline library in /usr/local/lib, and they usually don't  
even know why it's there. Lots of software needs readline, and the  
compiler keeps finding the weird old readline in /usr/local/lib  
before checking /opt/local/lib where the more up-to-date readline is,  
and then things break in mysterious and wonderful ways and we get to  
spend more time figuring it all out. So it becomes simpler to  
recommend not to put anything in /usr/local at all. But if you know  
what you're doing you can get away with some things there.




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