First thing I did was port -d selfupdate. port --version says: MacPorts 1.520 and goes into interactive mode. I started out trying to install meld. That apparently is an infinite task. After waiting over 5 minutes for port to stop what seemed to be an infinite loop of scanning dependencies, I went after it by hand and started installing the pieces. Until I found an inconsistency. I went after port deps on all the parts looking for where the problem was. Had I known it would have taken me 3 hours, I wouldn't have bothered. But since I spent the time looking (and I started bottom up :(, so I didn't find this very quickly) I wanted to raise this issue: (Eliding the branches of dependencies which aren't relevant to this conflict...) meld depends on py-gnome and py-gtk2 py-gnome depends on libzvt and py-gtk2 libzvt depends on gnome_session depends on control-center depends on nautilus depends on eel depends gnome_menus depends on py25_gtk2 (!) depends on py25_cairo py_gtk2 depends on py_cairo py25_cairo and py_cairo cannot be installed at the same time: # port install py25-cairo ---> Activating py25-cairo 1.4.0_1 Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/ include/pycairo/pycairo.h is being used by the active py-cairo port. Please deactivate this port first, or use the -f flag to force the activation. Error: Status 1 encountered during processing. HELP! --Doug P.S. Sometime during those three hours I think I ran into another py-... py25-... conflict which in my focus on this one, I didn't record :(, trying to get meld installed, but I don't know if it was also a py-gnome problem or not...