Why does Macports reinstall already available software?

[Jakob van Bethlehem]

Hej,

Quite an impressive, quick response from many people. That's very nice indeed. I guess my question was really a RTFM-like of question :P 
Anyways, software in /usr/local was not installed through MacPorts. Those packages I built myself from scratch and are managed using stow. That was before I learned about the existence of MacPorts. Now everything that was there I can handle through MacPorts, so the problem has vanished.

Sincerely, Jakob

On 9 okt. 2012, at 15:29, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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
>> 
>> 
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>