Failure to port Octave

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 21, 2008, at 11:08, Robert Fong-tom wrote:

> I manually removed the Aquaterm files and directories and re-ported  
> Octave. I now seem to get past the aquaterm portion but this time I  
> got the following error:
>
> Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/ 
> local/bin/a2p is being used by the active perl5 port.  Please  
> deactivate this port first, or use the -f flag to force the  
> activation.
> Error: The following dependencies failed to build: texlive  
> texlive_base perl5.8 texi2html texlive_texmf-full texlive_texmf- 
> minimal
> Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
>
> I suppose this is the same problem as before... but aren't there a  
> number of applications in OS X 10.4 that use perl5.8? I don't want  
> to screw this up by removing all the perl5.8 files. Should I take  
> Ryan's advice and do :
>
> sudo port -f activate perl5.8?
>
> Or should I manually remove all the perl5.8 files and directory and  
> start over?

No, this is not the same situation, and you should not force the  
activation. This is the problem that we have two ports that provide  
perl 5.8.8: perl5 and perl5.8. We are trying to transition from the  
perl5.8 port to the perl5 but the transition is incomplete, and you  
have encountered a port that has not yet been updated.

Ports have historically depended on the perl5.8 port, and in such a  
way that only the perl5.8 port can satisfy the dependency (a simple  
"port:perl5.8" dependency was used). Now we want to allow people to  
select which perl they want (be it perl5, perl5.8 or perl5.10). To do  
this, the dependency should be rewritten as "port:bin/perl:perl5".

By coincidence, the first port you installed that had a perl  
dependency asked for the perl5 port. And now you are encountering a  
port which has the old "port:perl5.8" dependency. It looks like we  
still have about 60 of those around that we need to fix.

I think you should deactivate the perl5 port (sudo port deactivate  
perl5) and then activate the perl5.8 port (sudo port activate  
perl5.8). Later, when we've sorted out the mess, you could do the  
reverse again, if desired.