MacPorts activation relating to bsdtar

[Steven]

Home directory installations have worked fine for me for years in the past. I understand some ports will not work, but everything I need to use works fine. 

That being said, I will try a few different things out to see if that fixes my problems.

> On Oct 12, 2019, at 05:20, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 12 Oct 2019, at 3:26 am, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>>> On Oct 11, 2019, at 10:49, Steven Esser wrote:
>>> 
>>> On a fresh Catalina (10.15) install with Xcode 11.1 and the latest CLI tools I cannot seem to activate any ports. Most seem to configure and build correctly, but fail when they reach the activation step. Attached is the log for an attempted installation of ncurses that has this activation step failure and occurs no matter what the port. 
>>> 
>>> From the log itself, it looks like bsdtar is the culprit? Bsdtar fails with this command "Command failed: /usr/bin/bzip2 -d -c /Users/sesser/MacPorts/var/macports/software/ncurses/ncurses-6.1_0.darwin_19.x86_64.tbz2 | ( bsdtar -xvp --hfsCompression -f - )”
>>> 
>>> This is the bsdtar found at /usr/bin/bsdtar.
>>> 
>>> Wanted to post this here to make sure there wasn’t a quick fix etc for this before I file a formal bug.
>>> 
>>> <main.log.zip>
>> 
>> Does the bsdtar command seem to work when you do things with it manually on the command line?
>> 
>> The log shows you have installed MacPorts into a custom prefix /Users/sesser/MacPorts. Any particular reason? It's recommended to use the standard /opt/local prefix so that you can benefit from our binaries, once they become available.
> 
> Also, it appears like you are using an area in your own user home area. I am not sure this is a good idea either, as macports needs to be able to control permissions on this area, and we have seen cases before where directories directly in the user home area have issues in this regard. I personally would recommend placing the installation elsewhere, and agree with Ryan using the default location is by far the best option.
> 
> Chris
>> 
>> The log shows that hfsCompression is being used. Up to Mojave, Apple's bsdtar didn't support hfsCompression. I haven't checked Catalina yet so it's possible that they've finally added it. But is it perhaps possible that you have a different bsdtar somewhere else on your system that MacPorts is using, and that other bsdtar isn't working?
>> 
>