MacPorts missing links

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Sep 13, 2016, at 2:06 AM, David Epstein <David.Epstein at warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 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?

Let's forget about the libpng.la problem for now. It is a bug in MacPorts base. We fixed it in trunk. It will be in the next release of MacPorts. After that release, the fix will make its way to each port as those ports are updated.


> 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.

You must have reinstalled MacPorts base after upgrading the OS; IIRC, MacPorts will not function if you don't; it will just display an error message telling you the OS it was built on doesn't match the OS it's running on and refer you to the migration instructions.

If you run "sudo port selfupdate" and "port outdated" now, and it shows no ports as outdated, then you're fine. If it shows any ports outdated, update them, then you'll be fine. No need to reinstall everything.