[macports] Building in a jail?

[Chris Pickel]

On 23 Jan, 2008, at 12:34, James Sumners wrote:
> I just upgraded from a PowerBook to a MacBook Pro. The migration
> assistant tool kept my old macports system intact. I can still run all
> of the ports I had installed; particularly, I can still use TeXmacs
> and teTeX. However, I had built all of my ports as PPC binaries, so
> they are running via Rosetta. This also means I can't update any of my
> ports because port fails to recognize the architecture. Since there
> have been so many posts lately about things failing to build on 10.5,
> I'm a little scared to wipe my old macports system and rebuild from
> scratch. I particularly can't afford to be without a LaTeX environment
> right now.
>
> So, is there any way I can "jail" a new installation of macports? If I
> can build everything successfully, I want to be able to delete the old
> version and move the new one to the standard location.

You can have multiple installs of MacPorts on a single system.  
However, some ports may not work if you change the location of the  
installation. So, I would recommend that you move the existing  
installation aside (i.e. `sudo mv /opt/local /opt/ppc`) and install a  
new one in its place. If you succeed at getting the new one running  
sufficiently, you can get rid of the old one; otherwise move the old  
one back in place.

In order to quarantine two MacPorts installations, you should build  
them from source. The tarballs are available on the Downloads [1]  
page. You should ./configure them along the lines of the following:

% ./configure --prefix=/opt/local \
               --with-tclpackage=/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl

You can pick something other than /opt/local if you want, but it might  
not work to move it back to /opt/local later, should you care. Also,  
it's possible that you might get conflicts for files installed in / 
Applications/MacPorts or /Library/Frameworks.

The Guide [2] briefly discusses this issue too.

[1] http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/
[2] http://guide.macports.org/#installing.source.multiple


Regards,

Chris