Stow uses symlinks to make it easy to uninstall packages. There's even a port for it. I highly recommend it.
I'm going ahead and trying the stow approach for the two MacPorts installations. I'll let you know what happens. The instructions for creating a second installation already suggest setting "startupitem_install no" even when not using symlinks, so that's what I'm doing. -- Steve On 10/27/17, 8:33 PM, "Ryan Schmidt" <[email protected]> wrote: On Oct 27, 2017, at 09:14, Langer, Stephen A. (Fed) wrote: > > Would it work to use stow to switch between two versions installed in /opt/local/stow/ports-x11 and /opt/local/stow/ports-quartz? I guess I'd also need a stow directory in /Applications or /Applications/MacPorts. Does macports install anything outside of /opt/local and /Applications/MacPorts? Will anything in macports break if it's used via the symlinks that stow sets up? I haven't heard of stow so I don't know if it will work. I don't know if anything will break if you use symlinks; I would expect most ports would work but some might not. Although ports should not install files outside of ${prefix}, ${applications_dir} and ${frameworks_dir}, ports are able to do so, and some do. Most notably, MacPorts base will install a launchd plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons for ports that request it, so you will have to configure your alternate MacPorts installations not to do that by setting "startupitem_install no" in macports.conf.
