MacPorts installation on a separate partition

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 19, 2011, at 08:06, Michelle Gill wrote:

> General feedback is welcome, but there are two questions in which I am specifically interested:
> 
> * Was the location of MacPorts changed during installation or was the default MacPorts installation moved from /opt/local to a secondary partition which was then linked to /opt/local? If the latter was done, was a symbolic link created from /opt/local to the second partition[1] or was the partition mounted at /opt/local using /etc/fstab or whatever Mac OS X is using these days for static mountpoints? (I have a Linux background and can't recall at the moment if Mac OS X uses something different.)
> 
> * How does MacPorts handle hard links to the main filesystem, e.g. to "/Applications/MacPorts/Python 2.6/Python Launcher.app," when it is located on a separate partition? 

I don't think such a hardlink can exist, since I think a hardlink must point to something on the same volume.

I suggest you compile MacPorts from source using a custom prefix -- on your second partition. Also locate the frameworks and applications there. Then almost everything will be nicely contained on your second drive.

PREFIX="/Volumes/myvolume/macports"

./configure \
--prefix=$PREFIX \
--with-tclpackage=$PREFIX/Library/Tcl \
--with-applications-dir=$PREFIX/Applications \
--with-frameworks-dir=$PREFIX/Library/Frameworks \
--enable-readline

make

sudo make install

ln -s $PREFIX/Applications /Applications/MacPorts