difficulty updating libiconv

David Winsemius dwinsemius at comcast.net
Tue Apr 23 20:55:07 PDT 2013


On Apr 23, 2013, at 7:47 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:

> Those suggested commands are given because MacPorts will not automatically clobber files that you manually placed into its domain. I'd say let MacPorts take over the files, and it will replace them with what should be properly there.

Thanks, Jeremy; That is what I decided to do, and it succeeded, at least to extent of this:  

port -qv installed > myports.txt

producing a file with:

 libiconvlibiconv @1.14_0 (active) platform='darwin 10' archs='x86_64'

... and in letting Octave access its help files. (I also got python and perl updated, so we will see if that causing any side-effects.)

-- 
david.

> 
> David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 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 The errors say my libiconv is out of date and need to be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



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