Minimising MacPorts Internal Disk Usage

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 15, 2013, at 09:25, René J.V. Bertin wrote:

> If only I knew ... It's possible that I did an "-u uninstall inactive", I have a vague memory that I should never use -u again!

"-u" has two different and IMHO unrelated uses in MacPorts.

The one I find useful is in connection with "upgrade": "sudo port -u upgrade foo" means "upgrade foo, then uninstall the old foo". I use this constantly.

The other is in connection with "uninstall": "sudo port -u uninstall foo" means "uninstall foo, and all inactive ports"; "sudo port -u uninstall inactive" means, redundantly, "uninstall all inactive ports, and all inactive ports". I've previously argued that we should remove this usage of the "-u" flag since it's unexpected and the functionality is already provided more intuitively via the "inactive" pseudoport.

Still, this should not have broken your MacPorts installation. The only problems I foresee are if a port neglected to declare a dependency on a another port, which you uninstalled, which then caused that port to stop working until you reinstalled the dependency. If that's what happened, then we simply need to know what port is missing what dependency so that we can add it, so that MacPorts will correctly prevent you from uninstalling it.