xfig / date / libintl problem on a MacBook Pro

[Joel Friedman]

Hi Everyone,

Many thanks for all the help.  Things are up and working, including xfig.

In case anyone is interested (or at least for my own records), here is my
guess as to what happened.

(1) I loaded coreutils and findutils and xfig on an older MacBook

(2) I copied the file /opt/local/bin/gdate to /opt/local/bin/date on the
older MacBook, so that an awk script I wrote on a Linux machine which had a 
system call to "date" would invoke gnu date on the Mac.

(3) I bought a new MacBook Pro with OS X 10.6.

(4) I used the Migration Assistant tool to transfer files from my old mac
to my new one, unaware that /opt was being moved.

(5) Was puzzled that I had coreutils and findutils on my new machine
"automatically" (I thought that the new mac and software had somehow set
things up)

(6) Ran xfig on the new mac and got some weird functionality.  So I tried
sudo port uninstall xfig; sudo port clean xfig; sudo port install xfig.

(7) From then on, even upon uninstalling and installing everything, I
get problems when trying to install xfig, that has problems with netpbm.

(8) Installed xfig by changing path in macports.conf (temporarily).
Then got rid of /opt/local/bin/date.

(9) Life is good again.

I'm guessing that all the uninstalls and cleans that I did failed to get
rid of the offensive /opt/local/bin/date that I created some time ago
that seemed to mess things up.

One last question: if I want to rebuild everything from scratch, in a
way that will get rid of any file in /opt/local/bin that shouldn't be
there, what is the best way to do this?  Remove /opt and download the
macports setup disk image?

Thanks again.

Cheers, Joel