gnumeric will not install

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 12, 2010, at 12:22, reiser.paul at gmail.com wrote:

> Hi - Error on that last message, Migration2.txt was the result of step 3, sorry. Anyway, I am now at the point where I have to decide whether to use the experimental automatic install or use the manual method. I would like to install  gnumeric, GDL, GIMP, and ImageMagick but I wonder if the manual method requires more knowledge than just that?

Only if you installed ports with specially-selected variants and want to do that again. If you just want the defaults, you can just e.g. "sudo port install ImageMagick" and let MacPorts figure out the dependencies as usual. According to your myports.txt, you did not have any ports installed with nonstandard variants (the only variants it shows selected are a few "+macosx" and "+darwin" which MacPorts automatically selects when needed, and the "+q16" on ImageMagick which is the default and automatically selected by ImageMagick), so this should be easy.

> Looking at the myports.txt file, I see "readline" which I believe is something ImageMagick requires, so this tells me I might have to figure out all the ports that are needed by the above four.

Let MacPorts do it for you as per usual. readline is pretty uninteresting low-level software. The port has no variants of consequence (see "port variants readline" if you're interested) so there isn't anything for you to consider or select here. It just needs to be installed, which MacPorts will do automatically as soon as you ask it to install something that requires readline. As far as I can tell, ImageMagick doesn't use readline, but it's a fairly common library and many other ports do use it.

> Should I give the automatic option a try?

If you like. But since the set of ports you want is straightforward, I'd just tell MacPorts to install those four ports that you specifically mentioned above.