Snow Leopard and /usr/local

[Paul T Baker]

thanks for the help.

I made a symlinked pointing to /usr/local and installed to the link.  
MacPorts ended up in /usr/local and able to see all of my old ports.  
And yes, after I uninstalled the old ports I uninstalled MacPorts and 
reinstalled to /opt/local.

thanks again,
Paul

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 24, 2009, at 11:53, Ben Greenfield wrote:
>
>> On Sep 24, 2009, at 12:51 PM, Paul T Baker wrote:
>>
>>> Way back when, I installed MacPorts in /usr/local.  I upgraded to 
>>> Snow Leopard and have attempted to get MacPorts 1.8 to install there 
>>> to no avail.  I know that Snow Leopard messes with /usr/local 
>>> permissions.
>
> I'm not aware of any Snow Leopard-specific changes to the permissions 
> of /usr/local. I know that in Snow Leopard / is not writable whereas 
> it was before. The change in MacPorts 1.8.0 that prevents installation 
> in /usr/local was not motivated by Snow Leopard, at any rate.
>
>>> I've tried all kinds of things to convince it to go there, but it 
>>> won't:
>>>
>>> configure: error: Installing MacPorts into /usr/local is not supported
>>>
>>> is what I'm told.
>
> Yes, that's the check we added in 1.8.0.
>
>>> I hear that installing into /usr/local can cause problems, so my 
>>> guess is that MacPorts explicitly refuses to install there.  fine.
>>>
>>> Mostly I want to uninstall all of my old ports that still live in 
>>> /usr/local.  I can't just rm the whole thing.  So my questions are:
>
> Hm. Does your existing MacPorts installation still function at all? If 
> not, what happens when you try to use the port command?
>
>>> If I install MacPorts elsewhere can I make it see all of the old 
>>> ports in /usr/local so it can uninstall them?
>
> There might be a way to trick it. You could try creating the directory 
> /opt and then creating a symlink at /opt/local pointing to /usr/local. 
> Then install MacPorts 1.8.0 from the disk image that you can download 
> from the MacPorts web site, which will install the new MacPorts into 
> /opt/local, and will not touch your installed ports. I'm not certain 
> it will install through the symlink, but I think there's at least a 
> chance it might. But then please do uninstall your ports (sudo port -f 
> uninstall installed) and uninstall MacPorts (see the FAQ in the wiki) 
> and reinstall it in a supported prefix.
>
>>> If not, can I (against all advice) trick MacPorts to install to 
>>> /usr/local to uninstall the ports? (I would then reinstall it 
>>> elsewhere)
>
> You could download the MacPorts base source, remove the line of code 
> that checks for /usr/local, and then install from source. See the wiki 
> how-to for instructions on installing from source.
>
>> I think the default is usually the default is /opt/local with usual a 
>> symlink to /usr/local/
>
> /opt/local is the default MacPorts prefix. As of MacPorts 1.8.0 we no 
> longer allow changing the prefix to /usr/local because we do not want 
> to provide technical support for the many unexpected situations that 
> this causes. Creating a symlink at /usr/local pointing to /opt/local 
> would probably be just as bad so please do not do that for regular use.
>
>