newbie struggles with e.g. gcc4.2

[Ryan Schmidt]

Welcome to MacPorts, Andy! Let's see if we can't get things  
straightened out.


On Jul 11, 2008, at 12:21, andy wrote:

> Well I'm getting nowhere.
> Running MacOS X 10.5.3.
>
> Installed macports - the universal one for leopard.
> It seemed to hang on the post-install script.

The installer was updating your ports tree. It can take many minutes  
to do the initial synchronization with the MacPorts server. Or it may  
not work if the rsync port is blocked on your network. If you  
interrupted the install, you should "sudo port selfupdate" now to  
update your ports tree. You should also run that command frequently,  
for example every day before you use the port command for the first  
time, to make sure you're up to date.


> Later
> installs don't but in any case I get no .profile created
> as the doc says.  No matter, I can fill in the values
> and get them on the path for usage.

That's correct. The 1.6.0 installer does not create this file. This  
is a bug. It has already been fixed for the next verison of MacPorts.


> But then two pieces
> of software I want to use on the mac that I use a lot
> are tkdiff and pdftk, neither of which I have succeeded
> in getting going.
>
> pdftk builds ok but gives me run time errors that I think are
> related to the X server not doing things it wants it to
> (DISPLAY is ok - I mean operations it won't do).  Sigh.

What is the error message?


> pdftk I can't build

You just said "pdftk builds ok" -- did you mean "tkdiff builds ok"?


> it depends on gcc4.2 and installation
> of that hangs while building (or is unbelievably slow
> in compiling).  This does not surprise me as I often had
> to do little fiddle to build gcc on linux systems in the past.

gcc takes a very very long time to build. Some points of reference:  
on a 2.2-GHz MacBook Pro it takes over an hour. On a 1.5-GHz  
PowerBook G4, it takes about 6 hours. My 466-MHz Power Mac G4 can  
take about a day to build it.


> Still sighing - I thought it was going to be easy - maybe
> I should try fink or run a linux under parallels.

I think I can safely say those routes will be more difficult than  
using MacPorts. MacPorts takes some getting used to, but it's really  
pretty good once you do.


> one thing I do notice is that many processes have the word darwin
> in the paths of things they are executing

Darwin is the OS underlying Mac OS X so this may be just fine.


> maybe the failure to
> get the post-install script working has created some configuration
> problems - so far my attempts to even find out what that script
> is called so I can debug it have failed.  Damn, this is hard,
> and I'm not a unix-newbie!

Please post exact error messages and exact commands you used to get  
them. This will help us help you get the problems resolved as quickly  
as possible.