On Feb 17, 2010, at 17:31, Sam Kuper wrote: > On 17 February 2010 22:38, Ryan Schmidt wrote: > >> Yes, this is normal. I was surprised by this too last time I upgraded boost, >> but boost seems to need about 5-6GB free hard drive space to build and >> install. After it's all built and installed, it occupies about 1.3GB. > > OK, it hadn't occurred to me that I'd need an OS's worth of space just to > upgrade some C++ libraries. Now I know better. Thank you for clueing me in.
Some software is big and requires a lot of time and space to build. I used to think the gcc ports (e.g. gcc43, gcc44) fell under this category, but they're pretty small compared to ports like boost, InsightToolkit, and qt4-mac. I don't particularly like it either, but it's difficult to file a bug report with such projects that says "your software is too big, make it smaller". > This sort of raises another issue. The MacPorts Guide says, "The selfupdate > option should be used regularly..." Well, OK. But when I run , I get the > following message: > > "The ports tree has been updated. To upgrade your installed ports, you should > run > port upgrade outdated" > > So this is what I did. And it turns out to have been a *really* expensive > operation: a *very* lengthy process that requires a *lot* of free HDD space. > It is too expensive an operation, for me at least, to run regularly. This advice is there because we don't want you running outdated ports and encountering and reporting problems that have already been fixed. Most ports do not take long to build on today's hardware, though a small handful of ports like boost still do. > So what's the solution? > > For me at least, the solution will involve installing software via .dmg files > wherever possible, instead of via MacPorts. Sure, you can do that. What I like about installing software with MacPorts is that there's just one place I have to go to keep it al up to date, instead of having to worry separately about each thing I've installed. Also, if you want to install any port in MacPorts that uses boost, it's going to build the MacPorts boost port; it's not going to use a standalone boost you've installed from a dmg. > It will also involve pruning as many unneeded ports as possible from my > system. Yes, I run port_cutleaves on occasion to do this. Of course in my case I test so many ports that usually the ports I've uninstalled that I didn't think I needed get reinstalled almost immediately as a dependency of something new I'm testing. :-/ > But I wonder, isn't there some way that MacPorts could provide > pre-built/compiled software? I mean, it's not like Mac users are running on > an especially diverse range of hardware... This topic comes up fairly often. It's a long-term goal of MacPorts to offer this but it hasn't been created yet. >> What error did you see when trying to log in to the issue tracker? > > "Unknown username email or password" > > I tried several times, and I'm pretty sure I typed the correct password. Then > I tried resetting the password via the "Lost password" form and attempted to > login with the new password that generated. This also resulted in the message: > > "Unknown username email or password". Ok, I'm afraid I don't know what's wrong. I'm not that familiar with Trac's inner workings. Perhaps if you email our admin, [email protected], he can help you. _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users
