Command to clean ~/.macports and misc Snow Leopard questions

[Ryan Schmidt]

As of MacPorts 1.8.0 and the inclusion of the GSoC '08 privileges code, the temporary directories in ~/.macports (for distfiles and building) are used when you "port install" something, whereas the temporary directories in /opt/local are used, as before, when you "sudo port install" something.

In my experience, what generally happens is I "port install" something by mistake, when I meant to "sudo port install". Port goes all the way to the installation phase, and fails because it doesn't have root permission. At which point I repeat the command with sudo, and it has to go through the whole build again because now it's in a different directory. I don't see the point of this behavior so in my installation I have created empty directories "Users" and "opt" inside ~/.macports and chowned them to 000 so nothing can write in there. This restores the pre-MacPorts 1.8.0 behavior of displaying a permission error when I forget to "sudo" for my "port installs", which is the behavior I want.

The ~/.macports directory also contains your port interactive history.


On Jan 4, 2010, at 16:25, Scott Haneda wrote:

> Anyone?  Just looking to know the significance of ~/.macports
> -- 
> Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ * 
> 
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 1:06 AM, Scott Haneda wrote:
> 
>> Hello, I updated to Snow Leopard today.  I have installed the new Dev Tools, X11 which was on the Snow installer, MacPorts, and am now installing my ports clean and new.
>> 
>> I saved a backup of /opt/local so I have all my user made files to move into place when I get all the ports working.
>> 
>> My case was that I did a clean OS install, so I did a clean MacPorts install.  All I have done so far is install mysql5 server version.
>> 
>> Do I need to make any changes to sources.conf or similar files?
>> 
>> I did run the below command just for the heck of it, and before that ran the selfupdate command and got a little love from the update that came out the other day.
>> `sudo port clean --work --archive all`
>> 
>> Are there any other changes I need to consider?
>> 
>> When I updated, I noticed there was ~/.macports which has a good deal of stuff in it, all seemingly related to ports I was at one time or another working on. I went ahead and cp'd it over from a backup into my new clean isntall.  Is there a way to clean that out, or can I just delete it and let it make itself new as needed?
>> 
>> I also took over ~/.profile and all other ~/. files for my PATH and other settings to be correct.  I did this before I installed MacPorts.  It all looks ok, but wanted to ask to make sure there is nothing I did too out of the ordinary.