what's .macports?

[Lloyd Wood]

At Friday 15/02/2008 16:13 -0800, Mack Johnson wrote:
>I just did a fresh install of leopard, I also updated to latest 10.5.2. I just installed MacPorts-1.6.0, but I get command not found. I also notice there's a folder in my home called .macports, I have no .profile. Yes I have the Xcode Tools installed. Should I create a profile? What is the .macpots for? 

I went through this. MacPorts 1.6.0 installer is buggy, and doesn't run the script that installs stuff on your path and .profile - to be fixed in 1.6.1. So I did what that did by hand, and then had MacPorts throw CoreFoundation fork errors at me, which is apparently unusual. No fix.
Details starting at:
http://www.nabble.com/macports-installation-vs-10.5.1-Xcode-3.0--td15317391.html

So I gave up on MacPorts and tried fink http://www.finkproject.org/. Some minor-in-retrospect problems there - Leopard currently requires compiling a source tarball, online instructions need work - but I'm up and running with Fink.
Details starting at:
http://www.nabble.com/Fink-source-on-Leopard---installs-itself-fine%2C-but-doesn%27t-work--td15396389.html

Neither MacPorts or Fink seems to be as seamless to install as Cygwin (which gives a unix-like environment on Windows) but then Cygwin has had many years' head start in ironing out glitches.

And I've just found and deleted that empty .macports folder you mentioned...

L.

<http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>