Cleaning up an OLD macports system

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 18, 2010, at 10:14, Michael_google gmail_Gersten wrote:

> I have a mac that was heavily used three years ago, and has been
> mostly idle for two years.
> 
> I've got a new install of Macports on it now, and a bunch of things installed.
> 
> However, when a  port wanted to install db46, it claimed that I had to
> first remove the install from /usr/local/bin.
> 
> Checking shows a large amount of stuff from an old macports system
> back from before the move to /opt/local.
> 
> Is there any good/easy way to tell what in /usr/local is from an old
> macports, and clean it up/remove it, or is nuking the whole directory
> the only option?

To my knowledge, MacPorts never installed itself into /usr/local by default; it always used /opt/local. So either you manually built MacPorts for /usr/local (which isn't possible anymore), or you manually installed software into /usr/local.

It's not supported to have anything in /usr/local while using MacPorts because of the kinds of conflicts it can cause (like the one db46 specifically detects and tells you about, though many other ports are affect as well and won't tell you about it) so nuking the entire directory is what I recommend -- or better, rename it to, say, /usr/local.old, that way if there are configuration files, databases, etc. in it that you may still need, you can refer back to it later.