Horrible problems after moving /opt/local aside

David Epstein David.Epstein at warwick.ac.uk
Wed Oct 10 23:50:11 PDT 2007



Ryan Schmidt-24 wrote:
> 
> 
> On Oct 10, 2007, at 14:21, David Epstein wrote:
> 
>> Following advice, I moved /opt/local aside and I have since been  
>> having horrible problems.
>> I use latex and gv a lot.
>> It turned out that latex was in the old /opt/local (now /opt/ 
>> local.old) and I wasn't sure how to access it. I copied /opt/ 
>> local.old/bin/{selected items that seemed to belong to tex} to the  
>> new /opt/local/bin. That seems to work, but will probably go wrong  
>> when other files from the tex hierarchy are needed.
> 
> That's really not how MacPorts is supposed to be used. You should not  
> manually install programs into /opt/local. You should remove those  
> items from /opt/local again, and instead install latex using  
> MacPorts. Surely a port for it exists? Try "port search". If you  
> can't find the port, tell us exactly what software you're trying to  
> install (its homepage, for example) and I'll see if I can find its  
> port. Alternately, you could rebuild the software from source in a  
> different prefix, like /usr/local (bearing in mind the inherent  
> problems with choosing /usr/local) or any other prefix, like maybe  
> $HOME/bin.
> 

Through baptism by fire, I now know in a more than intellectual way the
truth of these remarks by Ryan Schmidt suggested. Of course, at the time I
damaged /opt/local by manual installation of latex, I didn't know that tex
was available under macports (because of lack of experience with using port
search). Yesterday I installed macports 4 times, each time doing less damage
manually, and each time getting further with installing my programs (thus
taking longer). The advice to use
sudo port clean --work program
from Ryan worked for a while on the third attempt, but then eventually gave
up the ghost, appropriately enough on ghostscript. I never tried his recipe
sudo port clean --work
because by that time I had well and truly learned the lesson about confining
the content of /opt/local to macports' devices, and I would not have had
total confidence in a system with possible traces of contamination.

The final install has been successful. I made a bash script with a long list
of software I wanted and then
port  -c install $i, as Paul Beard had suggested. I then sudo'ed the script
(avoiding annoying sudo timeout), and went to bed. In the morning, not a
single error, just as you guys had promised me.

I certainly plan to keep my /opt/local in good shape, and would no longer
dream of installing anything else there, so my searing experiences have done
some good.
Thanks to everyone for help. I hope this post isn't wasting bandwidth. There
are probably not many people who managed to mess up as comprehensively as I
did, so maybe the post serves no purpose.
David.Epstein at warwick.ac.uk

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