MacPorts missing links

[David Epstein]

Thanks very much for all your work on my issue: much appreciated.

However, it’s looking like too much manual work, and also somewhat hazardous, at least to me as a non-expert. Moreover, I have no confidence that everything will be consistent, even if I successfully and correctly manually delete a number of symlinks, regular files and directories from /opt/local. Rather than spend more time on the problem, I will now move /opt/local to /opt/local.old and start again from scratch. It will be nice to have a clean installation that I don’t need to work on. I'm hoping that everything I need will install without error messages, but maybe that is overoptimistic.

I will avoid using “port select”  on my new installation, until I get the go-ahead that the problems have been researched and sorted. I’m not sure if I am allowed to put my name on some kind of cc list for the ticket, since I’m not intending to work on the problem, but only want to know when it has gone away.

Possibly I misunderstand, but your earlier emails seem to imply that you feel that the only problem with “select” in MacPorts is the creation of symlinks that are not deleted when uninstalling. However, I do not believe this is the whole story. For example, my command
> port installed ‘*python*3*’

was answered
> “None of the specified ports is installed”.

Nevertheless the directory /opt/local/etc/select/python3 remains on my system as useless clutter and there is no obvious way to delete it except manually, which ought to be a “No-no". This has nothing to do with symlinks.

A final point, that I hope is not out-of-place. On my system
> port select —list llvm

responds with
> Available versions for llvm:
> 	mp-llvm-3.5
> 	none (active)
and you have told me that “mp-llvm-3.5” is not the name of a port. I do not understand the issues involved and their ramifications, so I may be saying something stupid, but it seems to me, as a naive user, that this reveals a rather bad design fault in “port select”. An "available version" should either be “none” or the true name of an installed port. I realize that resources  to fix things are scarce, but could the ability to choose a random name at least be acknowledged as bad practice, and could a ticket be provided for work to be done so that this behaviour becomes impossible?
Best wishes
David