Why does Macports reinstall already available software?

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

When you say you already have some packages installed, do you mean via 
MacPorts, or via some other method external to MacPorts ?

If external, then what you are seeing is normal expected behaviour. 
MacPorts does not use external third party libraries, and will install 
all the dependencies it needs for a given package itself. For more 
details on why, see

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#syslibs

Chris

On 09/10/12 14:24, Jakob van Bethlehem wrote:
> Dear users,
>
> As a brand new user of macports I may oversee some obvious places to
> look for answers, if so, my apologies - I'm always happy with a
> reference to the appropriate documentation documents. But sofar I have
> been unable to figure out an answer to the following scenario:
> - I have a system that has already some package installed, e.g.
> subversion 1.7.6 (same happened for Python 2.x series) in /usr/local/
> - Next I try to install a macport of some package that has these
> software suites as a dependency (in this case eric4, or bluefish for the
> Python-case)
> - Macports installs a brand new version of those dependencies in
> /opt/local.... why?
>
> Short of the unneeded use of hd-space, this gives me enormous headaches
> in setting my PATH correctly, and afaics for no reason. So, what's what
> I can't see (yet) ?
>
> Sincerely,
> Jakob van Bethlehem
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> macports-users mailing list
> macports-users at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users