a) Searching the Archives & b) Uninstalling

[David Winsemius]

Apologies if I am retracing old ground, but I could not find a FAQ or a link to a search facility to the Archives on the user-support page: https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users .  

a) I'm a regular reader and contributor to r-help and typically use Markmail for searching the R-help archives, but do not see that this macports is archived there.  Where or how do people generally search?



b) I'm trying to adhere to the conventions that the official Mac port of R is using and they do not like packages installed with Macports, homebrew or Fink because R modules (if that is the right word) are statically linked and they do not feel that the choice of where packages get put by these installation services end up in the canonical directory. So I am trying to update my curl installation and I think it was installed with macports, probably some time ago before I updated to Lion v 10.7.5. I don;'t see much point in updating to ML and there are current problems with Mavericks installation of R so I'm not ready to take that leap forward, either.

At the moment I'm getting this response to my efforts at even  updating Macpoorts:

david-winsemiuss-mac-pro:~ davidwinsemius$ sudo port selfupdate
--->  Updating MacPorts base sources using rsync
MacPorts base version 2.1.3 installed,
MacPorts base version 2.3.1 downloaded.
--->  Updating the ports tree
--->  MacPorts base is outdated, installing new version 2.3.1
Warning: Disabling readline support due to readline in /usr/local
Installing new MacPorts release in /opt/local as root:admin; permissions 0755; Tcl-Package in /Library/Tcl

Error: /opt/local/bin/port: port selfupdate failed: Error installing new MacPorts base: command execution failed
-----------------

I've read that trying to uninstall macPorts can be dangerous and advised to pose my question here. What advice can anyone offer.


David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA