Spider Webs

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 23, 2015, at 7:59 PM, James Linder wrote:
> 
> Long ago (a week or 2) in a land far away (right here)
> 
> X failed to start about 1 in 2 making my ports that use X11 fail to start.
> So I upgraded to el Capitan and formatted my disk (case sensitive)
> Many ports did work but gnuplot and QT5 failed to build.
> 
> So I downgraded and installed yosemite. Everything builds, X always starts, all good except the dear folk who support the ports asked that my tickets include the fail log.
> 
> I did have my time machine running (beware if you change from case sensitive to insensitive time machine balks)
> 
> Being a sucker for punishment, getting the logs, heeding the ticket advice, I reinstalled el Capitan using time machine.
> Everything works and is familiar, but future port builds will not.
> 
> If I move /opt/local away, reinstall el Capitan version of macports, build all my ports does the auld /opt/local contain *everything* or are there spider webs related that will make this step a real bad move? DBUS comes to mind.
> I’m thinking about future ports and about moving this /opt/local back if I can’t get QT5 to build. 
> I can build gnuplot with -aquaterm option.

/opt/local does not contain everything a MacPorts port might install. We discourage port authors from installing files in strange locations, but nothing technically prevents a port from installing files anywhere. The list of *common* locations where things get installed is included in the uninstallation instructions:

https://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.macports.uninstalling.html

However you're already aware of one exception: the plist installed by the dbus port.


In general, if you need software (such as qt5) that does not build on the latest OS (such as El Capitan) right now, you would probably have the best experience for now by remaining on a previous OS (like Yosemite). However, in the specific case of qt5, I just tested installing qt5 5.5.1 on El Capitan, and it installed just fine. So if it didn't build for you, there may be a problem that we could resolve, but as mentioned in #50108 we would need to see the main.log file to know what went wrong.