Why does Macports reinstall already available software?

[Jakob van Bethlehem]

Hello,

So, if I may, a little follow-up then. I got into this business since it looked like an easy way to install eric4. And indeed it worked like a charm. But suppose I wanted to give eric5 a try. Using MacPorts I can easily install python 3.3, but eric5 I'll have to build manually. That's oke, but what is the recommended location to put such packages? Like said, usually I'd create a /usr/local/stow tree and use stow to manage it, but it seems that is not recommended with MacPorts anymore?

Sincerely, Jakob


On 9 okt. 2012, at 15:34, Jakob van Bethlehem <jsvanbethlehem at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> macports-users mailing list
>>> macports-users at lists.macosforge.org
>>> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
>> 
>