gross error

[Scott Haneda]

On Jul 8, 2010, at 9:39 AM, John B Brown wrote:
> 	I'll stop getting entangled with functional anomalies in MacPorts. Any UNIX/Linux utilities I want I'll modify for myself to work on my iMac. There's a /usr/local here for a purpose; that's where the gnu utilities go automatically.

I'm not sure why you are having so many issues with this.  I believe in reading over your thread you have done a completely new install of your OS.  If that is the case, and you are having these issues, the only thing I can think of is you have corrupt installer discs, something is wrong with your hardware, or your process is flawed.  Perhaps you are migrating in an old data file of ~/.profile or ~/.bash* or something that is causing troubles.

I once spent many days brining online a G5 Dual CPU server to have issues in which nothing was working right, no apps would build, lots of problems.  It turned out to be a bad CPU.  I popped in a new CPU, and all my troubles went away.

If you are game, I would suggest the following, as MacPorts truly does make things easier, not harder:
    1) Backup
    2) Erase hard drive
    3) Reinstall OS clean
    4) Perform Apple Software Update, do not use the combo updaters 
       unless you verify MD5's on them and ensure you are using the correct one
    5) Install Developer tools, just one package, with X11
    6) Run Apple Software Update again
    7) Install MacPorts
    8) Run sudo port selfupdate
    9) If everything now works, install a few simple ports to double check
    10) Move your data back in place, testing along the way to make sure nothing breaks

Far too many people are working with MacPorts in a perfectly reliably fashion aside from known issues.  Everyone at the least, has it installed, which is where your system seems to be having trouble.  I see no reason why that can't be accomplished on your system, unless there are hardware issues, software corruption, or silent data corruption problems.

-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)