/opt/local/macports/software

[Daniel J. Luke]

> On Jan 19, 2015, at 3:25 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 3:12 PM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On the other hand, I solved it by copying most of /opt/local/var/macports
> > onto an external USB drive and symlinking it back. Huge USB external drives
> > are ridiculously cheap these days.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I tried that, and got slapped on the fingers with references to security, sandboxing, and the like.
> 
> /opt/local itself can't be safely symlinked because various things break when it's not a real directory.

it mostly works (port provides doesn't, for now), but I run it this way on a machine for test purposes to make sure it keeps working (actually my /opt is a symlink). One needs to set portdbpath in macports.conf to the 'real' path, but it does work to use a symlink to keep prefix the same (so that you can still use MacPorts provided binaries).

You can, of course, also just install MacPorts in an alternate prefix (which is very much supported) - you just need to install from source and you loose the ability to use the MacPorts provided binaries.

> Certain parts of things underneath it very much can be without problems; I moved the build tree, sources, and distfiles. (The build tree was the only thing that worried me, and probably trace mode won't work that way --- but then, I'm unlikely to use trace mode on the Air.)

I haven't tested trace mode with my symlink'd config, so it's possible that it doesn't work.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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