> On Sep 11, 2016, at 5:22 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote: > > >> On Sep 11, 2016, at 4:57 PM, David Epstein <david.epst...@warwick.ac.uk> >> wrote: >> >> Thanks very much for all your work on my issue: much appreciated. >> >> However, it’s looking like too much manual work, and also somewhat >> hazardous, at least to me as a non-expert. Moreover, I have no confidence >> that everything will be consistent, even if I successfully and correctly >> manually delete a number of symlinks, regular files and directories from >> /opt/local. Rather than spend more time on the problem, I will now move >> /opt/local to /opt/local.old and start again from scratch. > > If you like, but that sounds like a lot of work to me. It didn't sound like > there was anything particularly wrong with your old MacPorts installation, > aside from a few broken symlinks created by port select, and maybe one or two > other broken symlinks whose origins I'm not sure of yet. For example, > libpng.la should not have existed on your system, if your OS is Mavericks or > later. > > >> It will be nice to have a clean installation that I don’t need to work on. >> I'm hoping that everything I need will install without error messages, but >> maybe that is overoptimistic. >> >> I will avoid using “port select” on my new installation, until I get the >> go-ahead that the problems have been researched and sorted. I’m not sure if >> I am allowed to put my name on some kind of cc list for the ticket, since >> I’m not intending to work on the problem, but only want to know when it has >> gone away. > > There's no need to avoid using "port select", if you want the functionality > it provides. It just doesn't automatically remove its symlinks if you later > uninstall the port you had asked "port select" to select. Until we fix that, > remember to "port select GROUP none", where GROUP is the name of the select > group.
And certainly you can Cc yourself on any tickets you're interested in following, by clicking the ticket's CcMe! button. >> I do not understand the issues involved and their ramifications, so I may be >> saying something stupid, but it seems to me, as a naive user, that this >> reveals a rather bad design fault in “port select”. An "available version" >> should either be “none” or the true name of an installed port. I realize >> that resources to fix things are scarce, but could the ability to choose a >> random name at least be acknowledged as bad practice, and could a ticket be >> provided for work to be done so that this behaviour becomes impossible? > > I think we don't consider this to be a design fault, but a feature. In other > words, it was not a mistake that the select group entry can differ from a > port; it was a deliberate decision to allow that. As has been pointed out, we > want to be able to select things that are part of macOS and are not provided > by a port. > > I agree that some of the select group entry names we've chosen are not > optimal in the way in which they differ from the name of the port they > provide. It might be a pain to fix that at this late date. Maybe we could also display the name of the port, if any, that provides each select group entry. _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
