Macports 1.8, creating my stable environment

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Wed Sep 16 18:19:18 PDT 2009


On Sep 16, 2009, at 19:51, Scott Haneda wrote:

> Hello, I have a Power Mac Dual G5, it's current state is that I  
> develop on it, and have the 1.7 branch of MacPorts installed.
>
> I have no problems blowing away /opt/local and starting clean.   
> There are a few sites that I would back up, and a few databases I  
> would maintain, but outside of that, there is not a lot going on.
>
> I want to start using this as a main production machine, and  
> migrating old sites to it in an effort to retire some older machines.
>
> Should I update to 1.8, or would it be better to install clean?

Upgrading with selfupdate should be fine. You don't need to uninstall  
MacPorts or reinstall all your ports, unless you have upgraded the OS  
version since installing MacPorts.


> As it is now, my only needs are Apache2, MySql5, and php current.  I  
> just need to know that those things will build clean and without  
> trouble.  I can afford a few hours downtime on this machine as it is  
> now.
>
> What is your suggested course of action?  I have been reading some  
> reports of troubles here with 1.8, and want to make sure I am not  
> getting into a situation in which I will be stuck, or have to just  
> install 1.7 and go from there.

There are some issues in 1.8.0, yes. "port load" isn't working which  
might affect you if you want to run server processes; in that case,  
use the longer "sudo launchctl ..." commands. There is an issue if the  
top-level directory you're installing into is a symlink, so don't do  
that. There are several issues if your MacPorts install is not owned  
by root, so use a normal root-owned install for now. We now pass "- 
arch" all the time, not just for universal builds, and this breaks  
some ports -- in particular glib2 is broken due to this on PowerPC. I  
will look into this soon. Any other issues you're thinking of?

You can always build MacPorts from source in a totally different  
prefix, keeping your current MacPorts installation untouched, to test  
if everything builds ok.


> Once I build this machine out, it would be best to not have to shove  
> 1.8 ontop of 1.7 just for the sake of being clean about it.

As you wish, but MacPorts is designed to be upgraded, so upgrading  
using selfupdate should be fine, assuming you have not upgraded the OS  
version from say Tiger to Leopard since installing MacPorts.




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