Tue, 13 Jan 2009 (11:27 -0500 UTC) Shreevatsa R wrote:
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote:
I said then [1], and still say now, that we need a more general solution
that makes MacPorts display a warning to the user if they install software
in the prefix /usr/local. We have never supported the user installing
software in the prefix /usr/local [2] and it causes problems in many more
situations than this. MacPorts should actively inform users that they are
doing things they should not, and how to correct them (even if that's only
by providing a link to a FAQ entry or Guide section).
[1]
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-November/006982.html
[2] http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15077
I don't think this is a reasonable policy for MacPorts to have.
/usr/local is the "standard" location for software manually installed
by the user. Are you suggesting that
(1) users should configure all their software with some other prefix, or
(2) they should not install anything at all outside of MacPorts?
Neither of them is a practical solution. There are application bundles
that *do* install to /usr/local, and it is impossible to use "just
MacPorts" because of the thousands of things that don't work:
http://trac.macports.org/report/1
Try `grep -R /usr/local /opt/local` just to see how many Macports
reference files in /usr/local. If you install Macports gcc, I suspect
even that tool searches /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib. The
auto tools used to install with /usr/local as the preferred place to
look for configuration files, headers, and libraries. I haven't checked
recently, but I suspect that is still the case.
The proper solution is for MacPorts to figure out a way of preventing
its ports from looking outside ${prefix} -- whether /usr/local or /usr
or any directory at all.
It is probably not practical, but if ports were each to run a recursive
sed on source trees to change all references to '/usr/local/' from that
to '/opt/local', you might get some safety from the /usr/local
pollution.
--
Dr. Robert Delius Royar Associate Professor of English
Morehead State University Morehead, Kentucky
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