difficulty updating libiconv

[David Winsemius]

Running MacOS 10.6.8 on an early 2008 MacPro. In the process of attempting to work with GNU-Octave for Andrew Ng's Coursera Machine Learning course, I am getting errors when attempting to access the help facility. The errors say my libiconv is out of date and need to be updated to version 8.0.0.

octave-3.4.0:1> help eye
dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libiconv.2.dylib
 Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/makeinfo
 Reason: Incompatible library version: makeinfo requires version 8.0.0 or later, but libiconv.2.dylib provides version 7.0.0
warning: help: Texinfo formatting filter exited abnormally; raw Texinfo source of help text follows...

I originally tried downloading copies of libiconv and replacing them in /opt/local/lib/ but that did not seem to be effective.  So I thought I could use MacPorts to do this. So wading into what has turned out to a swamp I am now getting further crocodiles, er, ...   errors, the latest is:

--->  Installing python27 @2.7.3_1
--->  Activating python27 @2.7.3_1
Error: org.macports.activate for port python27 returned: Image error: /Applications/MacPorts/Python 2.7/Build Applet.app/Contents/Info.plist already exists and does not belong to a registered port.  Unable to activate port python27. Use 'port -f activate python27' to force the activation.
Error: Failed to install python27

The original command was:  sudo port upgrade --force libiconv

Which has generated an impressively long list of items that MacPorts thinks needs to be upgraded and is erroring out on occasion.

(The last two such errors I decided to go ahead and issue the suggested activate command, but I am wondering whether this is safe now.) So should I keep on executing suggestions like: 

   sudo port -f activate python27

I also run R (and if I had to choose between Octave remaining "helpless" versus difficulties with R I would abandon Octave in a millisecond). The R binaries are provided by Simon Urbanek at ATT who I think believes thinks MacPorts is evil and generally advises to avoid MacPorts or Homebrew.  I do have some stuff in /opt/local/ including tcl, tk, ImageMagick and sqlite binaries, but no copies of libiconv appear to reside there. I have read that one should "move that directory aside" but I have not yet seen an explicit command showing those of us with little brain how to accomplish this "movement".

Do I really need to have libiconv version 14 when Octave is only complaining about not having version 8? Could I save time by just upgrading to that version. If so what would be the right incantation?

-- 

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA
David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA