How to activate an older version of a port

[Jerry]

On Jan 15, 2013, at 12:13 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 
> On Jan 14, 2013, at 18:24, Jerry wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 13, 2013, at 4:43 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jan 12, 2013, at 00:39, Jerry wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Since /opt/local is seen before /usr/local/ (which has automake 1.9 in it), I want to temporarily roll back macports automake to 1.11.3. I get this:
>>> 
>>> Note that having software installed in /usr/local is likely to cause you problems with MacPorts, which is why we do not support having software installed there.
>>> 
>>> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#usrlocal
>> 
>> I've read this discussion before. I thought it was OK to have stuff in subdirectories of /usr/local but not OK to have stuff /usr/local directly. Is that not correct? I know this is a flamey topic so I won't say more.
> 
> Yes, having software installed into a prefix below /usr/local is fine. For example, the official MySQL binaries are (used to be?) distributed with a prefix like /usr/local/mysql-X.Y.Z; this is fine. But installing into prefix /usr/local (i.e. files installed into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/include, /usr/local/lib) can cause problems.
> 
Ah--thanks for the clarification. I think I'll be taking a look at this in due course to see if I can clean things up on my machine.
Jerry