MacPorts missing links

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Sep 12, 2016, at 10:53 AM, Sinan Karasu <sinan at bozuk.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sep 12, 2016, at 4:25 AM, David Epstein <David.Epstein at warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>> sudo find -L /opt/local -type l
>>> For example, libpng.la should not have existed on your system, if your OS is Mavericks or later.
> 
> Now you made me curious. My OS is Sierra, and has been for about a month. I had installed MacPorts from sources. At first I couldn’t install much of anything, since I always got an error on Sierra. About a week or so ago, things sorted themselves out.

The Sierra GM has only been out for a few days, with the public release still a week away, so do expect a certain amount of problems with MacPorts on Sierra for the next month or two as port maintainers upgrade to Sierra, see what the problem are, and figure out how to solve them.


> Since then I’ve installed 3 ports(I believe).
> xfig
> ipe
> cgal
> 
> And this is the result I get:
> 
> pirlouit:~ sinan$ sudo find -L /opt/local -type l
> /opt/local/lib/libpng.la
> pirlouit:~ sinan$ 
> 
> The one you say I shouldn’t get. And that is the only one.

.la files are not installed by MacPorts, by default, for the vast majority of ports, as of OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The macports.conf setting that controls this is delete_la_files. (It is not listed in macports.conf by default because users probably shouldn't be overriding it.) Some ports (well, exactly three ports: ImageMagick, uriparser, xapian-core) override it because they require their own .la files for some reason. libpng does not override it so the .la file should not be there.

What do you get when you run:

port provides /opt/local/lib/libpng.la

I assume it will say it's not provided by a MacPorts port, in which case you have to ask yourself how it got there, if MacPorts didn't put it there. Did you run some third-party installer that put it (and probably other files) there? What is the file's creation date, and can you find any other files on your system created around the same time that might give you an idea of what it came with?