where does macports installs programs?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:27 AM, Craig Treleaven wrote:
> At 8:07 AM -0700 7/10/14, Ryan Ware wrote:
> 
>> Are there cases where the port can be installed without success?  If so, what are those corner cases?
>> 
>> I for one am quite happy that builds are repeatable.  I've lived in environments where builds weren't necessarily repeatable and it was...problematic.
> 
> I think he was referring to cases such as where the post-activate step fails.  Usually, in such cases, the software is "installed" but some configuration step may not have happened.  Eg, a default configuration file might not be copied to where it ought to be

Builds *should* be repeatable. Sometimes they're not; that would be a bug that we should fix. For example, it might be the case that a port builds differently on two different systems: on one system, an optional dependency was already installed beforehand, while on the other it was not. The solution in that case would be to either add the optional dependency to the port so that it always has that feature enabled, or to configure the port to never use the optional dependency, even if it is already installed beforehand (and then possibly add a variant so the user can enable the feature if desired).