MacPorts missing links

[David Epstein]

> On 13 Sep 2016, at 03:19, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sep 12, 2016, at 9:08 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 9:59 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>> What do you get when you run:
>> port provides /opt/local/lib/libpng.la
>> 
>> They actually provided that earlier:
>> 
>>> /opt/local/lib/libpng.la  is provided by: libpng
> 
> David provided this information about his installation but Sinan didn't yet.
> 
> But you know, not only should /opt/local/lib/libpng.la not exist on Mavericks or later, it shouldn't be a symlink on any system; it should be a text file.
> 
> If it's a symlink on your system, what's it a symlink to?

Here is the story from my file system
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% pwd
/opt/local/lib
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% ls -l libpng.la
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  11  6 Sep 10:13 libpng.la@ -> libpng16.la
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% port provides libpng.la
/opt/local/lib/libpng.la is provided by: libpng
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% ls libpng*
libpng.a@		libpng.la@		libpng16.a
libpng.dylib@		libpng16.16.dylib*	libpng16.dylib@
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% ls -l libpng16.la
ls: libpng16.la: No such file or directory
Macintosh-2:/<2>lib% port installed libpng
The following ports are currently installed:
  libpng @1.6.21_0
  libpng @1.6.22_0
  libpng @1.6.23_0
  libpng @1.6.25_0 (active)

This looks to me as though it is saying that Ryan was right. the .la file does not exist, only a shadow of it which presumably won’t cause any harm. One question: why the 6 Sept date. Would my uninstall of python have changed the date on the broken symlink?

One thing that seems to be brought out (by the erroneous answer by “port provides ligpng.la") is that I made a mistake when updating the OS, to have updated my MacPorts installation, rather than reinstalled. I have been hankering after reinstalling, but Ryan persuaded me not to. This seems to be a new bit of evidence that I ought to reinstall, but I would like Ryan to confirm that he now agrees with this, in the light of the new evidence.

David