Preventing other software from linking against MacPorts libraries

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 10, 2024, at 09:57, Smith wrote:
> 
> Thanks all for the replies. The software depends on openssl, libpng and libjpeg.

And the name and version of the software that depends on those?

> In the past with other projects I left MacPorts in place but used Homebrew to install these dependencies, or just built those dependencies from scratch. It's not a "bad" thing for them to link to MacPorts libraries per se.  

Having Homebrew and MacPorts installed at the same time is likely to cause you problems. If you're building software manually, you could end up linking against one library from MacPorts and another library from Homebrew which is not only messy but might actually be incompatible if the two libraries are related. 

It's even possible, if you install a MacPorts port that has to build from source, that it is hard coded to look for Homebrew first and fall back to MacPorts, in which case your MacPorts port is now linked with a Homebrew library.

For these reasons we don't support having Homebrew installed at the same time as MacPorts and recommend you pick one package manager and uninstall the other(s). 

May I ask why you do not want to link your program with MacPorts libraries if linking with Homebrew libraries is acceptable? Why are they ok and we aren't? What can we change to become ok?


> Some of this might be due to my installing binary pre-built ports, which seem to not be code signed or not signed by me. I don't know if I were to install all ports in source form and build them locally would resolve some of my issues. I'm not sure how to cause port to reinstall everything installed from source and to use source ports rather than binary ports going forward. I'm sure it is documented somewhere...

On Apple Silicon, everything is at least ad-hoc signed because that's what the toolchain does by default. On earlier systems most things are not signed because that's what the toolchain does by default.

As far as I know there would be no difference if you built from source, except that it would take a lot longer, use a lot more energy, and you might encounter build failures. So I don't know why you would want to avoid the binaries we spend so much effort providing. But if you do:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/BinaryArchives#disable
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