MacPorts installation on a separate partition

[Michelle Gill]

On Jul 19, 2011, at 12:18 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 
> 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 should have been more clear, but this is why I was asking that question. My understanding is also that hard links must be within the same volume so that the linked files have the same inode number.

> 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

Thank you for the info. I haven't yet attempted this and, thus, haven't dug through the configure options. I didn't realize the location of /Applications/MacPorts and friends can be customized. This solves the aforementioned problem with hard links across volumes.


Regards,
Michelle