On Apr 4, 2012, at 12:42, Glenn English wrote:
>
> On Apr 4, 2012, at 10:27 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> Because /usr/local is searched by default by the compiler and we do not know
>> how to turn that off, MacPorts ports might try to link with libraries you've
>> installed in /usr/local.
>
> Ah! Thank you; that makes sense. I'll try to stay away from installing
> libraries there.
>
> I just looked, and all that's in mine is perl, python, and ruby -- I'll also
> keep in mind your explanation when something goes odd with a MacPorts build.
>
> Is that default search part of the compiler code, or is it because of $PATH?
It is code in the compiler. It's not related to $PATH.
> If Apple doesn't use /usr/local libraries, why would they have anything to do
> with a compiler that forces that search? That'd result in a lot on badly bent
> code lying around.
The definition of /usr/local is a directory where users put things they've
compiled themselves; things that did not come from the OS vendor. Therefore it
is right for Apple to not ship anything in /usr/local, and it's perhaps even
reasonable for them to ship a compiler that looks there for dependencies. I
didn't think this was an Apple-specific thing; I thought that's just how GCC
works, but I don't know for sure.
> This might be overkill, but have you considered adding code to your scripts
> to mv /usr/local to /usr/localqw (and back at the end)? Or maybe just the lib
> dir?
I had not considered that. But MacPorts is not always installed as root; when
not root, it would not have permission to do that. Also, moving /usr/local is
likely to break whatever's installed there. I think the user needs to be the
one to understand the consequences of their actions of installing things in
/usr/local and be the one to take responsibility for uninstalling those items.
Not everything in /usr/local is necessarily a problem. But we do not want to
spend our time analyzing what rogue software is and isn't a problem; we have
real actual MacPorts issues that we want to spend our time solving that don't
involve rogue software. If a user reports a problem, and the error message or
log contents point to something existing in /usr/local, our response will be to
make the user remove /usr/local and try again.
I might not be opposed to MacPorts printing a warning if anything is found in
/usr/local/{bin,etc,include,lib,libexec,man,sbin,share,var}. But I would
probably only want to print that if a port actually failed to build.
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