macports policy of dependencies and installations

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:25:59PM +0100, Rodrigo Ventura said:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've just switched from Panther to Leopard, and decided to remove my  
> previous macports installation and restart afresh. I'v been installing  
> some software, namely playerstage suite, but I'm wondering why macport  
> needs to install so much already available software in the Leopard  
> system. For instance, what sense does it make to re-install libz 1.2.3 if 
> Leopard come with that same version, and perl? and m4? and xorg?

That answer is documented on the FAQ (and the answer right after):

<http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#WillMacPortslinktosystemlibrariesratherthanitsown>

>
> I feel like building an operating system from scratch, in /opt/local,  
> with all potential conflicts with the Leopard base system (since /opt/ 
> local/bin has to be in PATH in order for macports to be useful).
>
> Moreover, I suspect that some difficulties compiling software (e.g.,  
> PIL), as for instance compilation complains libz does not support PPC (of 
> course! macport's libz, same version as Leopard's, but without PPC  
> support, is superimposing in PIL's built script lib search path).

This is the first time I've heard of zlib having issues on PPC.  What kinds
of error messages are you seeing?

Bryan


>
> Can anyone shed some light on this? Or point me towards some FAQ question 
> clearing this up?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Rodrigo Ventura
> Institute for Systems and Robotics
> (www.isr.ist.utl.pt)
> Instituto Superior Técnico
> Lisbon, Portugal
>