On Oct 9, 2007, at 03:23, Marcus D'Camp wrote:
On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 03:01:29PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
I also see /usr/local in that path. Stuff in /usr/local can interfere
with MacPorts too. I recommend you remove everything from /usr/local
and use MacPorts to install whatever software you need. If software
you need is not in MacPorts, portfiles can be added.
Sorry to hijack the thread, I too have a /usr/local/ on my system. Is
it safe to rm -r /usr/local/* ? The only think I had installed was
mutt
which has been replaced with the MacPort. Actually on second glance,
my nearly vanilla Powerbook I also have a /usr/local/ from Carbon
Copy Cloner if I remember right (psync and other perl related).
I've removed all the mutt related binaries, should I be ok?
I don't know if it's ok to "rm -rf /usr/local"; only you know what
you have in there and whether you're using it. Probably safer to "mv /
usr/local /usr/local-off" and see if all Hell breaks loose. If it
does, you can reinstate /usr/local until you figure out how to un-
break it. But if everything's fine after, say, a week, then you can
probably nuke /usr/local. But first check and make sure you don't
have any data in there you need. For example, the official MySQL
binaries install into /usr/local/mysql and all your databases are in /
usr/local/mysql/data, so if you use that MySQL distribution, erasing /
usr/local would erase your databases, which you probably wouldn't want.
Some things in /usr/local are ok. Applications (like mutt) are not
too dangerous to have there. It's libraries than can cause problems.
One issue we keep encountering is users who have weird old versions
of the readline library in /usr/local/lib, and they usually don't
even know why it's there. Lots of software needs readline, and the
compiler keeps finding the weird old readline in /usr/local/lib
before checking /opt/local/lib where the more up-to-date readline is,
and then things break in mysterious and wonderful ways and we get to
spend more time figuring it all out. So it becomes simpler to
recommend not to put anything in /usr/local at all. But if you know
what you're doing you can get away with some things there.
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