packages are active but not recognized

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 27, 2009, at 18:03, Scott Haneda wrote:

> On Nov 27, 2009, at 3:08 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> On Nov 27, 2009, at 14:22, Brandon Allbery wrote:
>> 
>>> MacPorts doesn't know about and can't use Fink packages as prerequisites.
>> 
>> More importantly, having both Fink and MacPorts around at the same time will cause conflicts and problems sooner or later. You should decide which one you want to use, and remove the other.
> 
> Curious as to what problems? As long as you do not do prefix sharing of /sw isn't MacPorts designed specificially with this type of isolation in mind?
> 
> I suppose you would have to be very careful with your PATH, and I would lean on none for installed binaries, using full paths so I always know which app I'm using.

The authors of many software packages have realized that people use Fink and MacPorts to install things, and they hardcode their software to look in /sw and /opt/local for dependencies. So even if your PATH is fine (which won't be used by MacPorts anyway), software installed by MacPorts might try to use Fink dependencies, or vice versa, depending on the order the author of that package searches directories in.