Problems installing ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 23, 2010, at 15:06, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:

> On Apr 22, 2010, at 10:03 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> What he means is: MacPorts is in /opt/local, and anything in /usr/local is something you've installed locally on your system and it might interfere with MacPorts, therefore it is not supported to have anything in /usr/local while using MacPorts. Please remove anything you have in /usr/local.
> 
> There has probably already been a discussion about adding a warning output to the port command when certain problems are encountered like /usr/local exists and is not $prefix.

We already warn when readline is found in /usr/local because that had been a very common cause of problems building MacPorts itself at selfupdate time. We don't have a general warning though for just /usr/local exists. In fact, things may work fine if you have /usr/local. To be honest, I have one, with just a few things I couldn't install with MacPorts. But I know not to install libraries in there, since they might interfere.

We also already prevent $prefix from being /usr/local; that's a whole new class of problems we don't want.

> If not it may be worth adding to the port command because in the short time I've been on the mailing list I've seen numerous times this same thing and only by joining our list or reading through the online docs will people become aware of the conflict.

It may indeed be worthwhile to find new warnings we can put in. They will have to be more specific than just "/usr/local exists" though as this has in the past already angered some (when such a check was added to the db46 port for a short time).